Melita Insula

Venus and Adonis

2011-07-19T00:46:00.000-07:00

Venus, playing one day with her boy Cupid, wounded her bosom with one of his arrows. She pushed him away, but the wound was deeper than she thought. Before it healed she beheld Adonis, and was captivated with him. She no longer took any interest in her favorite resorts—Paphos, and Cnidos, and Amathos, rich in metals. She absented herself even from heaven, for Adonis was dearer to her than heaven. Him she followed and bore him company. She who used to love to recline in the shade, with no care but to cultivate her charms, now rambles through the woods and over the hills, dressed like the huntress Diana; and calls her dogs, and chases hares and stags, or other game that it is safe to hunt, but keeps clear of the wolves and bears, reeking with the slaughter of the herd. She charged Adonis, too, to beware of such dangerous animals. “Be brave towards the timid,” said she; “courage against the courageous is not safe. Beware how you expose yourself to danger and put my happiness to risk. Attack not the beasts that Nature has armed with weapons. I do not value your glory so high as to consent to purchase it by such exposure. Your youth, and the beauty that charms Venus, will not touch the hearts of lions and bristly boars. Think of their terrible claws and prodigious strength! I hate the whole race of them. Do you ask me why?” Then she told him the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, who were changed into lions for their ingratitude to her.

Having given him this warning, she mounted her chariot drawn by swans, and drove away through the air. But Adonis was too noble to heed such counsels. The dogs had roused a wild boar from his lair, and the youth threw his spear and wounded the animal with a sidelong stroke. The beast drew out the weapon with his jaws, and rushed after Adonis, who turned and ran; but the boar overtook him, and buried his tusks in his side, and stretched him dying upon the plain.

Venus, in her swan-drawn chariot, had not yet reached Cyprus, when she heard coming up through midair the groans of her beloved, and turned her white-winged coursers back to earth. As she drew near and saw from on high his lifeless body bathed in blood, she alighted and, bending over it, beat her breast and tore her hair. Reproaching the Fates, she said, “Yet theirs shall be but a partial triumph; memorials of my grief shall endure, and the spectacle of your death, my Adonis, and of my lamentations shall be annually renewed. Your blood shall be changed into a flower; that consolation none can envy me.” Thus speaking, she sprinkled nectar on the blood; and as they mingled, bubbles rose as in a pool on which raindrops fall, and in an hour’s time there sprang up a flower of bloody hue like that of the pomegranate. But it is short-lived. It is said the wind blows the blossoms open, and afterwards blows the petals away; so it is called Anemone, or Wind Flower, from the cause which assists equally in its production and its decay.

Milton alludes to the story of Venus and Adonis in his “Comus”:

“Beds of hyacinth and roses

Where young Adonis oft reposes,

Waxing well of his deep wound

In slumber soft, and on the ground

Sadly sits th’ Assyrian queen;”

Glaucus and Scylla

2011-07-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

Glaucus was a fisherman. One day he had drawn his nets to land, and had taken a great many fishes of various kinds. So he emptied his net, and proceeded to sort the fishes on the grass. The place where he stood was a beautiful island in the river, a solitary spot, uninhabited, and not used for pasturage of cattle, nor ever visited by any but himself. On a sudden, the fishes, which had been laid on the grass, began to revive and move their fins as if they were in the water; and while he looked on astonished, they one and all moved off to the water, plunged in, and swam away. He did not know what to make of this, whether some god had done it or some secret power in the herbage. “What herb has such a power?” he exclaimed; and gathering some of it, he tasted it. Scarce had the juices of the plant reached his palate when he found himself agitated with a longing desire for the water. He could no longer restrain himself, but bidding farewell to earth, he plunged into the stream. The gods of the water received him graciously, and admitted him to the honor of their society. They obtained the consent of Oceanus and Tethys, the sovereigns of the sea, that all that was mortal in him should be washed away. A hundred rivers poured their waters over him. Then he lost all sense of his former nature and all consciousness. When he recovered, he found himself changed in form and mind. His hair was sea-green, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and he fancied himself rather a good-looking personage.

One day Glaucus saw the beautiful maiden Scylla, the favorite of the water-nymphs, rambling on the shore, and when she had found a sheltered nook, laving her limbs in the clear water. He fell in love with her, and showing himself on the surface, spoke to her, saying such things as he thought most likely to win her to stay; for she turned to run immediately on the sight of him, and ran till she had gained a cliff overlooking the sea. Here she stopped and turned round to see whether it was a god or a sea animal, and observed with wonder his shape and color. Glaucus partly emerging from the water, and supporting himself against a rock, said, “Maiden, I am no monster, nor a sea animal, but a god; and neither Proteus nor Triton ranks higher than I. Once I was a mortal, and followed the sea for a living; but now I belong wholly to it.” Then he told the story of his metamorphosis, and how he had been promoted to his present dignity, and added, “But what avails all this if it fails to move your heart?” He was going on in this strain, but Scylla turned and hastened away.

Glaucus was in despair, but it occurred to him to consult the enchantress Circe. Accordingly he repaired to her island—the same where afterwards Ulysses landed, as we shall see in one of our later stories. After mutual salutations, he said, “Goddess, I entreat your pity; you alone can relieve the pain I suffer. The power of herbs I know as well as any one, for it is to them I owe my change of form. I love Scylla. I am ashamed to tell you how I have sued and promised to her, and how scornfully she has treated me. I beseech you to use your incantations, or potent herbs, if they are more prevailing, not to cure me of my love,—for that I do not wish,—but to make her share it and yield me a like return.” To which Circe replied, for she was not insensible to the attractions of the sea-green deity, “You had better pursue a willing object; you are worthy to be sought, instead of having to seek in vain. Be not diffident, know your own worth. I protest to you that even I, goddess though I be, and learned in the virtues of plants and spells, should not know how to refuse you. If she scorns you scorn her; meet one who is ready to meet you half way, and thus make a due return to both at once.” To these words Glaucus replied, “Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean, and sea-weed on the top of the mountains, than I will cease to love Scylla, and her alone.”

The goddess was indignant, but she could not punish him, neither did she wish to do so, for she liked him too well; so she turned all her wrath against her rival, poor Scylla. She took plants of poisonous powers and mixed them together, with incantations and charms. Then she passed through the crowd of gambolling beasts, the victims of her art, and proceeded to the coast of Sicily, where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the shore to which Scylla used to resort, in the heat of the day, to breathe the air of the sea, and to bathe in its waters. Here the goddess poured her poisonous mixture, and muttered over it incantations of mighty power. Scylla came as usual and plunged into the water up to her waist. What was her horror to perceive a brood of serpents and barking monsters surrounding her! At first she could not imagine they were a part of herself, and tried to run from them, and to drive them away; but as she ran she carried them with her, and when she tried to touch her limbs, she found her hands touch only the yawning jaws of monsters. Scylla remained rooted to the spot. Her temper grew as ugly as her form, and she took pleasure in devouring hapless mariners who came within her grasp. Thus she destroyed six of the companions of Ulysses, and tried to wreck the ships of Æneas, till at last she was turned into a rock, and as such still continues to be a terror to mariners.

Keats, in his “Endymion,” has given a new version of the ending of “Glaucus and Scylla.” Glaucus consents to Circe’s blandishments, till he by chance is witness to her transactions with her beasts. 1 Disgusted with her treachery and cruelty, he tries to escape from her, but is taken and brought back, when with reproaches she banishes him, sentencing him to pass a thousand years in decrepitude and pain. He returns to the sea, and there finds the body of Scylla, whom the goddess has not transformed but drowned. Glaucus learns that his destiny is that, if he passes his thousand years in collecting all the bodies of drowned lovers, a youth beloved of the gods will appear and help him. Endymion fulfils this prophecy, and aids in restoring Glaucus to youth, and Scylla and all the drowned lovers to life.

The following is Glaucus’s account of his feelings after his “sea-change”:

“I plunged for life or death. To interknit

One’s senses with so dense a breathing stuff

Might seem a work of pain; so not enough

Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt,

And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt

Whole days and days in sheer astonishment;

Forgetful utterly of self-intent,

Moving but with the mighty ebb and flow.

Then like a new-fledged bird that first doth show

His spreaded feathers to the morrow chill,

I tried in fear the pinions of my will.

’Twas freedom! and at once I visited

The ceaseless wonders of this ocean-bed,”

The Search for Cleopatra

2011-07-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

Cleopatra VII was born in Egypt, but she was descended from a lineage of Greek kings and queens who had ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years. The Ptolemies of Macedonia are one of history's most flamboyant dynasties, famous not only for wealth and wisdom but also for bloody rivalries and the sort of "family values" that modern-day exponents of the phrase would surely disavow, seeing as they included incest and fratricide.

The Ptolemies came to power after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, who in a caffeinated burst of activity beginning in 332 B.C. swept through Lower Egypt, displaced the hated Persian occupiers, and was hailed by the Egyptians as a divine liberator. He was recognized as pharaoh in the capital, Memphis. Along a strip of land between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotis he laid out a blueprint for Alexandria, which would serve as Egypt's capital for nearly a thousand years. After Alexander's death in 323 B.C., Egypt was given to Ptolemy, one of his trusted generals, who, in a brilliant bit of marketing, hijacked the hearse bearing Alexander's body back to Greece and enshrined it in a tomb in Alexandria. Ptolemy was crowned pharaoh in 304 B.C. on the anniversary of Alexander's death. He made offerings to the Egyptian gods, took an Egyptian throne name, and portrayed himself in pharaonic garb.

The dynasty's greatest legacy was Alexandria itself, with its hundred-foot-wide main avenue, its gleaming limestone colonnades, its harborside palaces and temples overseen by a towering lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on the island of Pharos. Alexandria soon became the largest, most sophisticated city on the planet. It was a teeming cosmopolitan mix of Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Romans, Nubians, and other peoples. The best and brightest of the Mediterranean world came to study at the Mouseion, the world's first academy, and at the great Alexandria library. It was there, 18 centuries before the Copernican revolution, that Aristarchus posited a heliocentric solar system and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth. Alexandria was where the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek and where the poet Sotades the Obscene discovered the limits of artistic freedom when he unwisely scribbled some scurrilous verse about Ptolemy II's incestuous marriage to his sister. He was deep-sixed in a lead-lined chest.

The Ptolemies' talent for intrigue was exceeded only by their flair for pageantry. If descriptions of the first dynastic festival of the Ptolemies around 280 B.C. are accurate, the party would cost millions of dollars today. The parade was a phantasmagoria of music, incense, blizzards of doves, camels laden with cinnamon, elephants in golden slippers, bulls with gilded horns. Among the floats was a 15-foot Dionysus pouring a libation from a golden goblet. Where could they go from there but down? By the time Cleopatra VII ascended the throne in 51 B.C. at age 18, the Ptolemaic empire was crumbling. The lands of Cyprus, Cyrene (eastern Libya), and parts of Syria had been lost; Roman troops were soon to be garrisoned in Alexandria itself. Still, despite drought and famine and the eventual outbreak of civil war, Alexandria was a glittering city compared to provincial Rome. Cleopatra was intent on reviving her empire, not by thwarting the growing power of the Romans but by making herself useful to them, supplying them with ships and grain, and sealing her alliance with the Roman general Julius Caesar with a son, Caesarion.

Lest her subjects resent her Roman overtures, Cleopatra embraced Egypt's traditions. She is said to have been the first Ptolemaic pharaoh to bother to learn the Egyptian language. While it was politic for foreign overlords to adopt local deities and appease the powerful religious class, the Ptolemies were genuinely intrigued by the Egyptian idea of an afterlife. Out of that fascination emerged a hybrid Greek and Egyptian religion that found its ultimate expression in the cult of Serapis—a Greek gloss on the Egyptian legend of Osiris and Isis. One of the foundational myths of Egyptian religion, the legend tells how Osiris, murdered by his brother Seth, was chopped into pieces and scattered all over Egypt. With power gained by tricking the sun god, Re, into revealing his secret name, Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, was able to resurrect her brother-husband long enough to conceive a son, Horus, who eventually avenged his father's death by slaughtering uncle Seth.

By Cleopatra's time a cult around the goddess Isis had been spreading across the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. To fortify her position, and like other queens before her, Cleopatra sought to link her identity with the great Isis (and Mark Antony's with Osiris), and to be venerated as a goddess. She had herself depicted in portraits and statues as the universal mother divinity. Beginning in 37 B.C., Cleopatra began to realize her ambition to enlarge her empire when Antony restored several territories to Egypt and decreed Cleopatra's children their sovereigns. She appeared in the holy dress of Isis at a festival staged in Alexandria to celebrate Antony's victory over Armenia in 34 B.C., just four years before her suicide and the end of the Egyptian empire.

It was Cleopatra's intense identification with Isis, and her royal role as the manifestation of the great goddess of motherhood, fertility, and magic, that ultimately led Kathleen Martinez to Taposiris Magna. Using Strabo's ancient descriptions of Egypt, Martinez sketched a map of candidate burial sites, zeroing in on 21 places associated with the legend of Isis and Osiris and visiting each one she could find. "What brought me to the conclusion that Taposiris Magna was a possible place for Cleopatra's hidden tomb was the idea that her death was a ritual act of deep religious significance carried out in a very strict, spiritualized ceremony," Martinez says. "Cleopatra negotiated with Octavian to allow her to bury Mark Antony in Egypt. She wanted to be buried with him because she wanted to reenact the legend of Isis and Osiris. The true meaning of the cult of Osiris is that it grants immortality. After their deaths, the gods would allow Cleopatra to live with Antony in another form of existence, so they would have eternal life together."

After studying more than a dozen temples, Martinez headed west of Alexandria along the coastal road to explore the ruin she had begun to believe was the last, best hope for her theory. The temple at Taposiris Magna had been dated to the reign of Ptolemy II, though it may have been even older. The suffix Osiris in its name implied the site was a sacred spot, one of at least 14 throughout Egypt where legend holds that the body of Osiris (or a dismembered part of it) had been buried. With the Mediterranean on her right and Lake Mareotis on the left, Martinez mused on the possibility that Cleopatra might have traveled a similar route, selecting this strategic location for her burial because it was inside the limits of ancient Alexandria and not yet under the control of the Romans during those last days before her death. "When I saw the place my heart beat very fast," she recalls. As she walked the site, she trailed her hands along the white and beige limestone blocks of the temple's enclosure. This is it! she thought. This is it!

In 1935 British traveler Anthony de Cosson had called Taposiris Magna "the finest ancient monument left to us north of the Pyramids." What was surprising was how little work had been done at the site. In 1905 Evaristo Breccia, the renowned Italian archaeologist, had excavated the foundation of a small fourth-century A.D. Coptic basilica in the otherwise vacant courtyard of the enclosure and discovered an area of Roman baths. In 1998 a Hungarian team led by Győző Vörös found evidence of a colonnaded structure inside the enclosure that they concluded (incorrectly, as it turned out) had been an Isis temple. It was clear when Vörös's book, Taposiris Magna, was published in 2004 that the temple had had three incarnations—as a Ptolemaic sanctuary, a Roman fort, and a Coptic church. But was that the whole story? Zahi Hawass found himself pondering the possibility that a black granite bust of Isis that Vörös had coaxed from the dirt of Taposiris Magna might well be the face of Cleopatra herself. In October 2005 the dig got under way.

Today it's easy to imagine that the view from the pylon of Taposiris Magna looks much like it did in Cleopatra's day—if you can block out the unsightly band of condominiums and resort hotels between the coastal highway and the broad white sand beach and glimmering blue expanse of the Mediterranean. One hot, sun-washed morning at the temple in May 2010, Kathleen Martinez was bundled in a long-sleeve shirt, head scarf, and fingerless woolen gloves. "For some reason I am always cold when I am here," she said. The two months of excavation she had requested had turned into three months, and three months had become five years. On the bedrock in the middle of the site an array of column fragments showed the ghostly outlines of what Hawass and Martinez have concluded was not a temple to Isis, but a temple to Osiris. It was oriented on the east-west axis. At an angle just north were the faint hints of an Isis chapel; to the south, an excavated rectangular pit: "That was the sacred lake," Martinez says.

It's a cliché that you can stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere in Egypt and find something amazing from the long-gone past. When Martinez and a team of excavators began probing the ground in 2005, she was focused less on the ultimate prize of Cleopatra's tomb than on simply finding sufficient evidence to sustain her theory that Taposiris Magna might be the place to look. She hoped to demonstrate that the temple was among the most sacred of its day, that it was dedicated to the worship of Osiris and Isis, and that tunnels had been dug underneath the enclosure walls. Within the first year, she was rewarded by the discovery of a shaft and several underground chambers and tunnels. "One of our biggest questions is why did they dig tunnels of this magnitude," she says. "It had to be for a very significant reason." During the 2006-07 season the Egyptian-Dominican team found three small foundation deposits in the northwest corner of the Osiris temple, just inches from where the Hungarian expedition had stopped digging. The deposits conclusively linked the Osiris temple to the reign of Ptolemy IV, who ruled a century and a half before Cleopatra. In 2007, further supporting the view that the site was very important to the Greeks of ancient Egypt, the excavators found a skeleton of a pregnant woman who had died in childbirth. The tiny bones of the unborn baby lay between the skeleton's hips. Her jaw was distended, suggesting her agony, and her right hand was clutching a small white marble bust of Alexander the Great. "She is a mystery," said Martinez, who had a coffin built for the remains of the mother.

In six years Taposiris Magna has become one of Egypt's most active archaeology sites. More than a thousand objects have been recovered, 200 of them considered significant: pottery, coins, gold jewelry, the broken heads of statues (probably smashed by early Christians). An important discovery was a large cemetery outside the temple walls, suggesting that the subjects of a monarch wished to be buried near royal remains.

Yet the tomb of Cleopatra still hovers out of reach, like a tantalizing mirage, and the theory of who is buried at Taposiris Magna still rests more on educated speculation than on facts. Might not Cleopatra's reign have unraveled too quickly for her to build such a secret tomb? A fantastic story, like a horse with wings, flies in the face of the principle of parsimony. But it's a long hard haul from not-yet-proved to disproved. Critics of Martinez's theory point out that it is rare in archaeology for someone to announce they are going to find something and then actually find it. "There is no evidence that Cleopatra tried to hide her grave, or would have wanted to," says Duane Roller, a respected Cleopatra scholar. "It would have been hard to hide it from Octavian, the very person who buried her. All the evidence is that she was buried with her ancestors. The material associated with her at Taposiris Magna is not meaningful because material associated with her can be found in many places in Egypt."

"I agree that Octavian knew and authorized the place where she was buried," Martinez says. "But what I believe—and it is only a theory—is that after the mummification process was complete, the priests at Taposiris Magna buried the bodies of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in a different place without the approval of the Romans, a hidden place beneath the courtyard of the temple."

If Cleopatra's tomb is ever found, the archaeological sensation would be rivaled only by Howard Carter's unearthing of the tomb of King Tut in 1922. But will finding her tomb, not to say her body itself, deepen our portrait of the last Egyptian pharaoh? On one hand, how could it not? In the last hundred years about the only new addition to the archaeological record is what scholars believe is a fragment of Cleopatra's handwriting: a scrap of papyrus granting a tax exemption to a Roman citizen in Egypt in 33 B.C. On the other hand, maybe finding her tomb would diminish what Shakespeare called "her infinite variety." Disembodied, at large in the realm of myth, more context than text, Cleopatra is free to be of different character to different times, which may be the very wellspring of her vitality. No other figure from antiquity seems so versatile in her ambiguities, so modern in her contradictions.

It was lunch hour at the dig site, and the workers had gone to eat in the shade. We were sitting on top of the temple pylon in the radiance of noon, staring out at the sea beyond. There was a feeling of stillness in the air, an inkling of eternity, as if the old Egyptian gods were about—Re, who ruled over the earth, sky, and the underworld, and Isis, who saved Osiris by tricking Re into revealing his secret name.

The search for Cleopatra has come at no small cost to Martinez. She gave up her thriving law practice in Santo Domingo and poured much of her savings into her quest. She moved to an apartment in Alexandria, where she has begun studying Arabic. But it's not an easy life, far from her family and friends. During the revolution earlier this year, she was confronted by a group of aggressive men as she worked at the excavation site. For now, work at the site is on hold. She hopes to return in the fall. "I believe we are going to find what we are looking for," she says. "The difference is now we're digging in the ground, not in books."

National Geographic

Proserpine

2011-07-14T01:23:00.000-07:00

When Jupiter and his brothers had defeated the Titans and banished them to Tartarus, a new enemy rose up against the gods. They were the giants Typhon, Briareus, Enceladus, and others. Some of them had a hundred arms, others breathed out fire. They were finally subdued and buried alive under Mount Ætna, where they still sometimes struggle to get loose, and shake the whole island with earthquakes. Their breath comes up through the mountain, and is what men call the eruption of the volcano.

The fall of these monsters shook the earth, so that Pluto was alarmed, and feared that his kingdom would be laid open to the light of day. Under this apprehension, he mounted his chariot, drawn by black horses, and took a circuit of inspection to satisfy himself of the extent of the damage. While he was thus engaged, Venus, who was sitting on Mount Eryx playing with her boy Cupid, espied him, and said, “My son, take your darts with which you conquer all, even Jove himself, and send one into the breast of yonder dark monarch, who rules the realm of Tartarus. Why should he alone escape? Seize the opportunity to extend your empire and mine. Do you not see that even in heaven some despise our power? Minerva the wise, and Diana the huntress, defy us; and there is that daughter of Ceres, who threatens to follow their example. Now do you, if you have any regard for your own interest or mine, join these two in one.” The boy unbound his quiver, and selected his sharpest and truest arrow; then straining the bow against his knee, he attached the string, and, having made ready, shot the arrow with its barbed point right into the heart of Pluto.

In the vale of Enna there is a lake embowered in woods, which screen it from the fervid rays of the sun, while the moist ground is covered with flowers, and Spring reigns perpetual. Here Proserpine was playing with her companions, gathering lilies and violets, and filling her basket and her apron with them, when Pluto saw her, loved her, and carried her off. She screamed for help to her mother and companions; and when in her fright she dropped the corners of her apron and let the flowers fall, childlike she felt the loss of them as an addition to her grief. The ravisher urged on his steeds, calling them each by name, and throwing loose over their heads and necks his iron-colored reins. When he reached the River Cyane, and it opposed his passage, he struck the river-bank with his trident, and the earth opened and gave him a passage to Tartarus.

Ceres sought her daughter all the world over. Bright-haired Aurora, when she came forth in the morning, and Hesperus when he led out the stars in the evening, found her still busy in the search. But it was all unavailing. At length, weary and sad, she sat down upon a stone, and continued sitting nine days and nights, in the open air, under the sunlight and moonlight and falling showers. It was where now stands the city of Eleusis, then the home of an old man named Celeus. He was out in the field, gathering acorns and black-berries, and sticks for his fire. His little girl was driving home their two goats, and as she passed the goddess, who appeared in the guise of an old woman, she said to her, “Mother,”—and the name was sweet to the ears of Ceres,—“why do you sit here alone upon the rocks?” The old man also stopped, though his load was heavy, and begged her to come into his cottage, such as it was. She declined, and he urged her. “Go in peace,” she replied, “and be happy in your daughter; I have lost mine.” As she spoke, tears—or something like tears, for the gods never weep—fell down her cheeks upon her bosom. The compassionate old man and his child wept with her. Then said he, “Come with us, and despise not our humble roof; so may your daughter be restored to you in safety.” “Lead on,” said she, “I cannot resist that appeal!” So she rose from the stone and went with them. As they walked he told her that his only son, a little boy, lay very sick, feverish, and sleepless. She stooped and gathered some poppies. As they entered the cottage, they found all in great distress, for the boy seemed past hope of recovery. Metanim, his mother, received her kindly, and the goddess stooped and kissed the lips of the sick child. Instantly the paleness left his face, and healthy vigor returned to his body. The whole family were delighted—that is, the father, mother, and little girl, for they were all; they had no servants. They spread the table, and put upon it curds and cream, apples, and honey in the comb. While they ate, Ceres mingled poppy juice in the milk of the boy. When night came and all was still, she arose, and taking the sleeping boy, moulded his limbs with her hands, and uttered over him three times a solemn charm, then went and laid him in the ashes. His mother, who had been watching what her guest was doing, sprang forward with a cry and snatched the child from the fire. Then Ceres assumed her own form, and a divine splendor shone all around. While they were overcome with astonishment, she said, “Mother, you have been cruel in your fondness to your son. I would have made him immortal, but you have frustrated my attempt. Nevertheless, he shall be great and useful. He shall teach men the use of the plough, and the rewards which labor can win from the cultivated soil.” So saying, she wrapped a cloud about her, and mounting her chariot rode away.

Ceres continued her search for her daughter, passing from land to land, and across seas and rivers, till at length she returned to Sicily, whence she at first set out, and stood by the banks of the River Cyane, where Pluto made himself a passage with his prize to his own dominions. The river nymph would have told the goddess all she had witnessed, but dared not, for fear of Pluto; so she only ventured to take up the girdle which Proserpine had dropped in her flight, and waft it to the feet of the mother. Ceres, seeing this, was no longer in doubt of her loss, but she did not yet know the cause, and laid the blame on the innocent land. “Ungrateful soil,” said she, “which I have endowed with fertility and clothed with herbage and nourishing grain, no more shall you enjoy my favors.” Then the cattle died, the plough broke in the furrow, the seed failed to come up; there was too much sun, there was too much rain; the birds stole the seeds—thistles and brambles were the only growth. Seeing this, the fountain Arethusa interceded for the land. “Goddess,” said she, “blame not the land; it opened unwillingly to yield a passage to your daughter. I can tell you of her fate, for I have seen her. This is not my native country; I came hither from Elis. I was a woodland nymph, and delighted in the chase. They praised my beauty, but I cared nothing for it, and rather boasted of my hunting exploits. One day I was returning from the wood, heated with exercise, when I came to a stream silently flowing, so clear that you might count the pebbles on the bottom. The willows shaded it, and the grassy bank sloped down to the water’s edge. I approached, I touched the water with my foot. I stepped in knee-deep, and not content with that, I laid my garments on the willows and went in. While I sported in the water, I heard an indistinct murmur coming up as out of the depths of the stream; and made haste to escape to the nearest bank. The voice said, ‘Why do you fly, Arethusa? I am Alpheus, the god of this stream.’ I ran, he pursued; he was not more swift than I, but he was stronger, and gained upon me, as my strength failed. At last, exhausted, I cried for help to Diana. ‘Help me, goddess! help your votary!’ The goddess heard, and wrapped me suddenly in a thick cloud. The river god looked now this way and now that, and twice came close to me, but could not find me. ‘Arethusa! Arethusa!’ he cried. Oh, how I trembled,—like a lamb that hears the wolf growling outside the fold. A cold sweat came over me, my hair flowed down in streams; where my foot stood there was a pool. In short, in less time than it takes to tell it I became a fountain. But in this form Alpheus knew me and attempted to mingle his stream with mine. Diana cleft the ground, and I, endeavoring to escape him, plunged into the cavern, and through the bowels of the earth came out here in Sicily. While I passed through the lower parts of the earth, I saw your Proserpine. She was sad, but no longer showing alarm in her countenance. Her look was such as became a queen—the queen of Erebus; the powerful bride of the monarch of the realms of the dead.”

When Ceres heard this, she stood for a while like one stupefied; then turned her chariot towards heaven, and hastened to present herself before the throne of Jove. She told the story of her bereavement, and implored Jupiter to interfere to procure the restitution of her daughter. Jupiter consented on one condition, namely, that Proserpine should not during her stay in the lower world have taken any food; otherwise, the Fates forbade her release. Accordingly, Mercury was sent, accompanied by Spring, to demand Proserpine of Pluto. The wily monarch consented; but, alas! the maiden had taken a pomegranate which Pluto offered her, and had sucked the sweet pulp from a few of the seeds. This was enough to prevent her complete release; but a compromise was made, by which she was to pass half the time with her mother, and the rest with her husband Pluto.

Ceres allowed herself to be pacified with this arrangement, and restored the earth to her favor. Now she remembered Celeus and his family, and her promise to his infant son Triptolemus. When the boy grew up, she taught him the use of the plough, and how to sow the seed. She took him in her chariot, drawn by winged dragons, through all the countries of the earth, imparting to mankind valuable grains, and the knowledge of agriculture. After his return, Triptolemus built a magnificent temple to Ceres in Eleusis, and established the worship of the goddess, under the name of the Eleusinian mysteries, which, in the splendor and solemnity of their observance, surpassed all other religious celebrations among the Greeks.

There can be little doubt of this story of Ceres and Proserpine being an allegory. Proserpine signifies the seed-corn which when cast into the ground lies there concealed—that is, she is carried off by the god of the underworld. It reappears—that is. Proserpine is restored to her mother. Spring leads her back to the light of day.

Milton alludes to the story of Proserpine in “Paradise Lost,” Book IV.:

“…Not that fair field

Of Enna where Proserpine gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world,—

…might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive.”

Hood, in his “Ode to Melancholy,” uses the same allusion very beautifully:

“Forgive, if somewhile I forget,

In woe to come the present bliss;

As frighted Proserpine let fall

Her flowers at the sight of Dis.”

The River Alpheus does in fact disappear underground, in part of its course, finding its way through subterranean channels till it again appears on the surface. It was said that the Sicilian fountain Arethusa was the same stream, which, after passing under the sea, came up again in Sicily. Hence the story ran that a cup thrown into the Alpheus appeared again in Arethusa. It is this fable of the underground course of Alpheus that Coleridge alludes to in his poem of “Kubla Khan”:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree,

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea.”

In one of Moore’s juvenile poems he thus alludes to the same story, and to the practice of throwing garlands or other light objects on his stream to be carried downward by it, and afterwards reproduced at its emerging:

“O my beloved, how divinely sweet

Is the pure joy when kindred spirits meet!

Like him the river god, whose waters flow,

With love their only light, through caves below,

Wafting in triumph all the flowery braids

And festal rings, with which Olympic maids

Have decked his current, as an offering meet

To lay at Arethusa’s shining feet.

Think, when he meets at last his fountain bride,

What perfect love must thrill the blended tide!

Each lost in each, till mingling into one,

Their lot the same for shadow or for sun,

A type of true love, to the deep they run.”

The following extract from Moore’s “Rhymes on the Road” gives an account of a celebrated picture by Albano, at Milan, called a Dance of Loves:

“Tis for the theft of Enna’s flower from earth

These urchins celebrate their dance of mirth,

Round the green tree, like fays upon a heath;—

Those that are nearest linked in order bright,

Cheek after cheek, like rosebuds in a wreath;

And those more distant showing from beneath

The others’ wings their little eyes of light.

While see! among the clouds, their eldest brother,

But just flown up, tells with a smile of bliss,

This prank of Pluto to his charmed mother,

Who turns to greet the tidings with a kiss.”

Baucis and Philemon

2011-07-11T02:17:00.000-07:00

On a certain hill in Phrygia stands a linden tree and an oak, enclosed by a low wall. Not far from the spot is a marsh, formerly good habitable land, but now indented with pools, the resort of fen-birds and cormorants. Once on a time Jupiter, in human shape, visited this country, and with him his son Mercury (he of the caduceus), without his wings. They presented themselves, as weary travellers, at many a door, seeking rest and shelter, but found all closed, for it was late, and the inhospitable inhabitants would not rouse themselves to open for their reception. At last a humble mansion received them, a small thatched cottage, where Baucis, a pious old dame, and her husband Philemon, united when young, had grown old together. Not ashamed of their poverty, they made it endurable by moderate desires and kind dispositions. One need not look there for master or for servant; they two were the whole household, master and servant alike. When the two heavenly guests crossed the humble threshold, and bowed their heads to pass under the low door, the old man placed a seat, on which Baucis, bustling and attentive, spread a cloth, and begged them to sit down. Then she raked out the coals from the ashes, and kindled up a fire, fed it with leaves and dry bark, and with her scanty breath blew it into a flame. She brought out of a corner split sticks and dry branches, broke them up, and placed them under the small kettle. Her husband collected some pot-herbs in the garden, and she shred them from the stalks, and prepared them for the pot. He reached down with a forked stick a flitch of bacon hanging in the chimney, cut a small piece, and put it in the pot to boil with the herbs, setting away the rest for another time. A beechen bowl was filled with warm water, that their guests might wash. While all was doing, they beguiled the time with conversation.

On the bench designed for the guests was laid a cushion stuffed with sea-weed; and a cloth, only produced on great occasions, but ancient and coarse enough, was spread over that. The old lady, with her apron on, with trembling hand set the table. One leg was shorter than the rest, but a piece of slate put under restored the level. When fixed, she rubbed the table down with some sweet-smelling herbs. Upon it she set some of chaste Minerva’s olives, some cornel berries preserved in vinegar, and added radishes and cheese, with eggs lightly cooked in the ashes. All were served in earthen dishes, and an earthenware pitcher, with wooden cups, stood beside them. When all was ready, the stew, smoking hot, was set on the table. Some wine, not of the oldest, was added; and for dessert, apples and wild honey; and over and above all, friendly faces, and simple but hearty welcome.

Now while the repast proceeded, the old folks were astonished to see that the wine, as fast as it was poured out, renewed itself in the pitcher, of its own accord. Struck with terror, Baucis and Philemon recognized their heavenly guests, fell on their knees, and with clasped hands implored forgiveness for their poor entertainment. There was an old goose, which they kept as the guardian of their humble cottage; and they bethought them to make this a sacrifice in honor of their guests. But the goose, too nimble, with the aid of feet and wings, for the old folks, eluded their pursuit, and at last took shelter between the gods themselves. They forbade it to be slain; and spoke in these words: “We are gods. This inhospitable village shall pay the penalty of its impiety; you alone shall go free from the chastisement. Quit your house, and come with us to the top of yonder hill.” They hastened to obey, and, staff in hand, labored up the steep ascent. They had reached to within an arrow’s flight of the top, when turning their eyes below, they beheld all the country sunk in a lake, only their own house left standing. While they gazed with wonder at the sight, and lamented the fate of their neighbors, that old house of theirs was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of the corner posts, the thatch grew yellow and appeared a gilded roof, the floors became marble, the doors were enriched with carving and ornaments of gold. Then spoke Jupiter in benignant accents: “Excellent old man, and woman worthy of such a husband, speak, tell us your wishes; what favor have you to ask of us?” Philemon took counsel with Baucis a few moments; then declared to the gods their united wish. “We ask to be priests and guardians of this your temple; and since here we have passed our lives in love and concord, we wish that one and the same hour may take us both from life, that I may not live to see her grave, nor be laid in my own by her.” Their prayer was granted. They were the keepers of the temple as long as they lived. When grown very old, as they stood one day before the steps of the sacred edifice, and were telling the story of the place, Baucis saw Philemon begin to put forth leaves, and old Philemon saw Baucis changing in like manner. And now a leafy crown had grown over their heads, while exchanging parting words, as long as they could speak. “Farewell, dear spouse,” they said, together, and at the same moment the bark closed over their mouths. The Tyanean shepherd still shows the two trees, standing side by side, made out of the two good old people.

The story of Baucis and Philemon has been imitated by Swift, in a burlesque style, the actors in the change being two wandering saints, and the house being changed into a church, of which Philemon is made the parson. The following may serve as a specimen:

“They scarce had spoke, when, fair and soft,

The roof began to mount aloft;

Aloft rose every beam and rafter;

The heavy wall climbed slowly after.

The chimney widened and grew higher,

Became a steeple with a spire.

The kettle to the top was hoist,

And there stood fastened to a joist,

But with the upside down, to show

Its inclination for below;

In vain, for a superior force,

Applied at bottom, stops its course;

Doomed ever in suspense to dwell,

’Tis now no kettle, but a bell.

A wooden jack, which had almost

Lost by disuse the art to roast,

A sudden alteration feels.

Increased by new intestine wheels;

And, what exalts the wonder more,

The number made the motion slower;

The flier, though ’t had leaden feet,

Turned round so quick you scarce could see ’t;

But slackened by some secret power,

Now hardly moves an inch an hour.

The jack and chimney, near allied,

Had never left each other’s side:

The chimney to a steeple grown,

The jack would not be left alone;

But up against the steeple reared,

Became a clock, and still adhered;

And still its love to household cares

By a shrill voice at noon declares,

Warning the cook-maid not to burn

That roast meat which it cannot turn;

The groaning chair began to crawl,

Like a huge snail, along the wall;

There stuck aloft in public view,

And with small change, a pulpit grew.

A bedstead of the antique mode,

Compact of timber many a load,

Such as our ancestors did use,

Was metamorphosed into pews,

Which still their ancient nature keep

By lodging folks disposed to sleep.”

Midas

2011-07-07T04:28:00.000-07:00

Bacchus, on a certain occasion, found his old schoolmaster and foster-father, Silenus, missing. The old man had been drinking, and in that state wandered away, and was found by some peasants, who carried him to their king, Midas. Midas recognized him, and treated him hospitably, entertaining him for ten days and nights with an unceasing round of jollity. On the eleventh day he brought Silenus back, and restored him in safety to his pupil. Whereupon Bacchus offered Midas his choice of a reward, whatever he might wish. He asked that whatever he might touch should be changed into gold. Bacchus consented, though sorry that he had not made a better choice. Midas went his way, rejoicing in his new-acquired power, which he hastened to put to the test. He could scarce believe his eyes when he found a twig of an oak, which he plucked from the branch, become gold in his hand. He took up a stone; it changed to gold. He touched a sod; it did the same. He took an apple from the tree; you would have thought he had robbed the garden of the Hesperides. His joy knew no bounds, and as soon as he got home, he ordered the servants to set a splendid repast on the table. Then he found to his dismay that whether he touched bread, it hardened in his hand; or put a morsel to his lips, it defied his teeth. He took a glass of wine, but it flowed down his throat like melted gold.

In consternation at the unprecedented affliction, he strove to divest himself of his power; he hated the gift he had lately coveted. But all in vain; starvation seemed to await him. He raised his arms, all shining with gold, in prayer to Bacchus, begging to be delivered from his glittering destruction. Bacchus, merciful deity, heard and consented. “Go,” said he, “to the River Pactolus, trace the stream to its fountain-head, there plunge your head and body in, and wash away your fault and its punishment.” He did so, and scarce had he touched the waters before the gold-creating power passed into them, and the river-sands became changed into gold, as they remain to this day.

Thenceforth Midas, hating wealth and splendor, dwelt in the country, and became a worshipper of Pan, the god of the fields. On a certain occasion Pan had the temerity to compare his music with that of Apollo, and to challenge the god of the lyre to a trial of skill. The challenge was accepted, and Tmolus, the mountain god, was chosen umpire. The senior took his seat, and cleared away the trees from his ears to listen. At a given signal Pan blew on his pipes, and with his rustic melody gave great satisfaction to himself and his faithful follower Midas, who happened to be present. Then Tmolus turned his head toward the Sun-god, and all his trees turned with him. Apollo rose, his brow wreathed with Parnassian laurel, while his robe of Tyrian purple swept the ground. In his left hand he held the lyre, and with his right hand struck the strings. Ravished with the harmony, Tmolus at once awarded the victory to the god of the lyre, and all but Midas acquiesced in the judgment. He dissented, and questioned the justice of the award. Apollo would not suffer such a depraved pair of ears any longer to wear the human form, but caused them to increase in length, grow hairy, within and without, and movable on their roots; in short, to be on the perfect pattern of those of an ass.

Mortified enough was King Midas at this mishap; but he consoled himself with the thought that it was possible to hide his misfortune, which he attempted to do by means of an ample turban or head-dress. But his hair-dresser of course knew the secret. He was charged not to mention it, and threatened with dire punishment if he presumed to disobey. But he found it too much for his discretion to keep such a secret; so he went out into the meadow, dug a hole in the ground, and stooping down, whispered the story, and covered it up. Before long a thick bed of reeds sprang up in the meadow, and as soon as it had gained its growth, began whispering the story, and has continued to do so, from that day to this, every time a breeze passes over the place.

The story of King Midas has been told by others with some variations. Dryden, in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” makes Midas’s queen the betrayer of the secret:

“This Midas knew, and durst communicate

To none but to his wife his ears of state.”

Midas was king of Phrygia. He was the son of Gordius, a poor countryman, who was taken by the people and made king, in obedience to the command of the oracle, which had said that their future king should come in a wagon. While the people were deliberating, Gordius with his wife and son came driving his wagon into the public square.

Gordius, being made king, dedicated his wagon to the deity of the oracle, and tied it up in its place with a fast knot. This was the celebrated Gordian knot, which, in after times it was said, whoever should unite should become lord of all Asia. Many tried to untie it, but none succeeded, till Alexander the Great, in his career of conquest, came to Phrygia. He tried his skill with as ill success as others, till growing impatient he drew his sword and cut the knot. When he afterwards succeeded in subjecting all Asia to his sway, people began to think that he had complied with the terms of the oracle according to its true meaning.

Phaeton

2011-07-02T01:48:00.000-07:00

Phaethon was the son of Apollo and the nymph Clymene. One day a schoolfellow laughed at the idea of his being the son of the god, and Phaëton went in rage and shame and reported it to his mother. “If,” said he, “I am indeed of heavenly birth, give me, mother, some proof of it, and establish my claim to the honor.” Clymene stretched forth her hands towards the skies, and said, “I call to witness the Sun which looks down upon us, that I have told you the truth. If I speak falsely, let this be the last time I behold his light. But it needs not much labor to go and inquire for yourself; the land whence the Sun rises lies next to ours. Go and demand of him whether he will own you as a son.” Phaëton heard with delight. He travelled to India, which lies directly in the regions of sunrise; and, full of hope and pride, approached the goal whence his parent begins his course.

The palace of the Sun stood reared aloft on columns, glittering with gold and precious stones, while polished ivory formed the ceilings, and silver the doors. The workmanship surpassed the material; 1 for upon the walls Vulcan had represented earth, sea, and skies, with their inhabitants. In the sea were the nymphs, some sporting in the waves, some riding on the backs of fishes, while others sat upon the rocks and dried their sea-green hair. Their faces were not all alike, nor yet unlike,—but such as sisters’ ought to be. 1 The earth had its towns and forests and rivers and rustic divinities. Over all was carved the likeness of the glorious heaven; and one the silver doors the twelve signs of the zodiac, six on each side.

Clymene’s son advanced up the steep ascent, and entered the halls of his disputed father. He approached the paternal presence, but stopped at a distance, for the light was more than he could bear. Phœbus, arrayed in a purple vesture, sat on a throne, which glittered as with diamonds. On his right hand and his left stood the Day, the Month, and the Year, and, at regular intervals, the Hours. Spring stood with her head crowned with flowers, and Summer, with garment cast aside, and a garland formed of spears of ripened grain, and Autumn, with his feet stained with grape-juice, and icy Winter, with his hair stiffened with hoar frost. Surrounded by these attendants, the Sun, with the eye that sees everything, beheld the youth dazzled with the novelty and splendor of the scene, and inquired the purpose of his errand. The youth replied, “O light of the boundless world, Phœbus, my father,—if you permit me to use that name,—give me some proof, I beseech you, by which I may be known as yours.” He ceased; and his father, laying aside the beams that shone all around his head, bade him approach, and embracing him, said, “My son, you deserve not to be disowned, and I confirm what your mother has told you. To put an end to your doubts, ask what you will, the gift shall be yours. I call to witness that dreadful lake, which I never saw, but which we gods swear by in our most solemn engagements.” Phaëton immediately asked to be permitted for one day to drive the chariot of the sun. The father repented of his promise; thrice and four times he shook his radiant head in warning. “I have spoken rashly,” said he; “this only request I would fain deny. I beg you to withdraw it. It is not a safe boon, nor one, my Phaëton, suited to your youth and strength. Your lot is mortal, and you ask what is beyond a mortal’s power. In your ignorance you aspire to do that which not even the gods themselves may do. None but myself may drive the flaming car of day. Not even Jupiter, whose terrible right arm hurls the thunderbolts. The first part of the way is steep, and such as the horses when fresh in the morning can hardly climb; the middle is high up in the heavens, whence I myself can scarcely, without alarm, look down and behold the earth and sea stretched beneath me. The last part of the road descends rapidly, and requires most careful driving. Tethys, who is waiting to receive me, often trembles for me lest I should fall headlong. Add to all this, the heaven is all the time turning round and carrying the stars with it. I have to be perpetually on my guard lest that movement, which sweeps everything else along, should hurry me also away. Suppose I should lend you the chariot, what would you do? Could you keep your course while the sphere was revolving under you? Perhaps you think that there are forests and cities, the abodes of gods, and palaces and temples on the way. On the contrary, the road is through the midst of frightful monsters. You pass by the horns of the Bull, in front of the Archer, and near the Lion’s jaws, and where the Scorpion stretches its arms in one direction and the Crab in another. Nor will you find it easy to guide those horses, with their breasts full of fire that they breathe forth from their mouths and nostrils. I can scarcely govern them myself, when they are unruly and resist the reins. Beware, my son, lest I be the donor of a fatal gift; recall your request while yet you may. Do you ask me for a proof that you are sprung from my blood? I give you a proof in my fears for you. Look at my face—I would that you could look into my breast, you would there see all a father’s anxiety. Finally,” he continued, “look round the world and choose whatever you will of what earth or sea contains most precious—ask it and fear no refusal. This only I pray you not to urge. It is not honor, but destruction you seek. Why do you hang round my neck and still entreat me? You shall have it if you persist;—the oath is sworn and must be kept,—but I beg you to choose more wisely.”

He ended; but the youth rejected all admonition and held to his demand. So, having resisted as long as he could, Phœbus at last led the way to where stood the lofty chariot. It was of gold, the gift of Vulcan; the axle was of gold, the pole and wheels of gold, the spokes of silver. Along the seat were rows of chrysolites and diamonds which reflected all around the brightness of the sun. While the daring youth gazed in admiration, the early Dawn threw open the purple doors of the east, and showed the pathway strewn with roses. The stars withdrew, marshalled by the Day-star, which last of all retired also. The father, when he saw the earth beginning to glow, and the Moon preparing to retire, ordered the Hours to harness up the horses. They obeyed, and led forth from the lofty stalls the steeds full fed with ambrosia, and attached the reins. Then the father bathed the face of his son with a powerful unguent, and made him capable of enduring the brightness of the flame. He set the rays on his head, and, with a foreboding sigh, said, “If, my son, you will in this at least heed my advice, spare the whip and hold tight the reins. They go fast enough of their own accord; the labor is to hold them in. You are not to take the straight road directly between the five circles, but turn off to the left. Keep within the limit of the middle zone, and avoid the northern and the southern alike. You will see the marks of the wheels, and they will serve to guide you. And, that the skies and the earth may each receive their due share of heat, go not too high, or you will burn the heavenly dwellings, nor too low, or you will set the earth on fire; the middle course is safest and best. 2 And now I leave you to your chance, which I hope will plan better for you than you have done for yourself. Night is passing out of the western gates and we can delay no longer. Take the reins; but if at last your heart fails you, and you will benefit by my advice, stay where you are in safety, and suffer me to light and warm the earth.” The agile youth sprang into the chariot, stood erect, and grasped the reins with delight, pouring out thanks to his reluctant parent.

Meanwhile the horses fill the air with their snortings and fiery breath, and stamp the ground impatient. Now the bars are let down, and the boundless plain of the universe lies open before them. They dart forward and cleave the opposing clouds, and outrun the morning breezes which started from the same eastern goal. The steeds soon perceived that the load they drew was lighter than usual; and as a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without its accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty. They rush headlong and leave the travelled road. He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power. Then, for the first time, the Great and Little Bear were scorched with heat, and would fain, if it were possible, have plunged into the water; and the Serpent which lies coiled up round the north pole, torpid and harmless, grew warm, and with warmth felt its rage revive. Boötes, they say, fled away, though encumbered with his plough, and all unused to rapid motion.

When hapless Phaëton looked down upon the earth, now spreading in vast extent beneath him, he grew pale and his knees shook with terror. In spite of the glare all around him, the sight of his eyes grew dim. He wished he had never touched his father’s horses, never learned his parentage, never prevailed in his request. He is borne along like a vessel that flies before a tempest, when the pilot can do no more and betakes himself to his prayers. What shall he do? Much of the heavenly road is left behind, but more remains before. He turns his eyes from one direction to the other; now to the goal whence he began his course, now to the realms of sunset which he is not destined to reach. He loses his self-command, and knows not what to do,—whether to draw tight the reins or throw them loose; he forgets the names of the horses. He sees with terror the monstrous forms scattered over the surface of heaven. Here the Scorpion extended his two great arms, with his tail and crooked claws stretching over two signs of the zodiac. When the boy beheld him, reeking with poison and menacing with his fangs, his courage failed, and the reins fell from his hands. The horses, when they felt them loose on their backs, dashed headlong, and unrestrained went off into unknown regions of the sky, in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places, now up in high heaven, now down almost to the earth. The moon saw with astonishment her brother’s chariot running beneath her own. The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountain tops take fire; the fields are parched with heat, the plants wither, the trees with their leafy branches burn, the harvest is ablaze! But these are small things. Great cities perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes! The forest-clad mountains burned, Athos and Taurus and Tmolus and œte; Ida, once celebrated for fountains, but now all dry; the Muses’ mountain Helicon, and Hæmus; Ætna, with fires within and without, and Parnassus, with his two peaks, and Rhodope, forced at last to part with his snowy crown. Her cold climate was no protection to Scythia, Caucasus burned, and Ossa and Pindus, and, greater than both, Olympus; the Alps high in air, and the Apennines crowned with clouds.

Then Phaëton beheld the world on fire, and felt the heat intolerable. The air he breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of a pitchy darkness. He dashed forward he knew not whither. Then, it is believed, the people of Æthiopia became black by the blood being forced so suddenly to the surface, and the Libyan desert was dried up to the condition in which it remains to this day. The Nymphs of the fountains, with dishevelled hair, mourned their waters, nor were the rivers safe beneath their banks: Tanais smoked, and Caicus, Xanthus, and Meander; Babylonian Euphrates and Ganges, Tagus with golden sands, and Cayster where the swans resort. Nile fled away and hid his head in the desert, and there it still remains concealed. Where he used to discharge his waters through seven mouths into the sea, there seven dry channels alone remained. The earth cracked open, and through the chinks light broke into Tartarus, and frightened the king of shadows and his queen. The sea shrank up. Where before was water, it became a dry plain; and the mountains that lie beneath the waves lifted up their heads and became islands. The fishes sought the lowest depths, and the dolphins no longer ventured as usual to sport on the surface. Even Nereus, and his wife Doris, with the Nereids, their daughters, sought the deepest caves for refuge. Thrice Neptune essayed to raise his head above the surface, and thrice was driven back by the heat. Earth, surrounded as she was by waters, yet with head and shoulders bare, screening her face with her hand, looked up to heaven, and with a husky voice called on Jupiter:

“O ruler of the gods, if I have deserved this treatment, and it is your will that I perish with fire, why withhold your thunderbolts? Let me at least fall by your hand. Is this the reward of my fertility, of my obedient service? Is it for this that I have supplied herbage for cattle, and fruits for men, and frankincense for your altars? But if I am unworthy of regard, what has my brother Ocean done to deserve such a fate? If neither of us can excite your pity, think, I pray you, of your own heaven, and behold how both the poles are smoking which sustain your palace, which must fall if they be destroyed. Atlas faints, and scarce holds up his burden. If sea, earth, and heaven perish, we fall into ancient Chaos. Save what yet remains to us from the devouring flame. O, take thought for our deliverance in this awful moment!”

Thus spoke Earth, and overcome with heat and thirst, could say no more. Then Jupiter omnipotent, calling to witness all the gods, including him who had lent the chariot, and showing them that all was lost unless speedy remedy were applied, mounted the lofty tower from whence he diffuses clouds over the earth, and hurls the forked lightnings. But at that time not a cloud was to be found to interpose for a screen to earth, nor was a shower remaining unexhausted. He thundered, and brandishing a lightning bolt in his right hand launched it against the charioteer, and struck him at the same moment from his seat and from existence! Phaëton, with his hair on fire, fell headlong, like a shooting star which marks the heavens with its brightness as it falls, and Eridanus, the great river, received him and cooled his burning frame. The Italian Naiads reared a tomb for him, and inscribed these words upon the stone:

“Driver of Phœbus’ chariot, Phaëton,

Struck by Jove’s thunder, rests beneath this stone.

He could not rule his father’s car of fire,

Yet was it much so nobly to aspire.”

His sisters, the Heliades, as they lamented his fate, were turned into poplar trees, on the banks of the river, and their tears, which continued to flow, became amber as they dropped into the stream.

Milman, in his poem of “Samor,” makes the following allusion to Phaëton’s story:

“As when the palsied universe aghast

Lay … mute and still,

When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth

Devious through Heaven’s affrighted signs his sire’s

Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled

From th’ empyrean headlong to the gulf

Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep

Even now the sister trees their amber tears

O’er Phaëton untimely dead.”

In the beautiful lines of Walter Savage Landor, descriptive of the Sea-shell, there is an allusion to the Sun’s palace and chariot. The water-nymph says:

“…I have sinuous shells of pearly hue

Within, and things that lustre have imbibed

In the sun’s palace porch, where when unyoked

His chariot wheel stands midway on the wave.

Shake one and it awakens; then apply

Its polished lip to your attentive ear,

And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.”

Gebir, Book I

Diana and Actæon

2011-06-24T04:04:00.000-07:00

Thus in two instances we have seen Juno’s severity to her rivals; now let us learn how a virgin goddess punished an invader of her privacy. It was midday, and the sun stood equally distant from either goal, when young Actæon, son of King Cadmus, thus addressed the youths who with him were hunting the stag in the mountains: “Friends, our nets and our weapons are wet with the blood of our victims; we have had sport enough for one day, and to-morrow we can renew our labors. Now, while Phœbus parches the earth, let us put by our implements and indulge ourselves with rest.”

There was a valley thick enclosed with cypresses and pines, sacred to the huntress queen, Diana. In the extremity of the valley was a cave, not adorned with art, but nature had counterfeited art in its construction, for she had turned the arch of its roof with stones as delicately fitted as if by the hand of man. A fountain burst out from one side, whose open basin was bounded by a grassy rim. Here the goddess of the woods used to come when weary with hunting and lave her virgin limbs in the sparkling water.

One day, having repaired thither with her nymphs, she handed her javelin, her quiver, and her bow to one, her robe to another, while a third unbound the sandals from her feet. Then Crocale, the most skilful of them, arranged her hair, and Nephele, Hyale, and the rest drew water in capacious urns. While the goddess was thus employed in the labors of the toilet, behold Actæon, having quitted his companions, and rambling without any especial object, came to the place, led thither by his destiny. As he presented himself at the entrance of the cave, the nymphs, seeing a man, screamed and rushed towards the goddess to hide her with their bodies. But she was taller than the rest and overtopped them all by a head. Such a color as tinges the clouds at sunset or at dawn came over the countenance of Diana thus taken by surprise. Surrounded as she was by her nymphs, she yet turned half away, and sought with a sudden impulse for her arrows. As they were not at hand, she dashed the water into the face of the intruder, adding these words: “Now go and tell, if you can, that you have seen Diana unapparelled.” Immediately a pair of branching stag’s horns grew out of his head, his neck gained in length, his ears grew sharp-pointed, his hands became feet, his arms long legs, his body was covered with a hairy spotted hide. Fear took the place of his former boldness, and the hero fled. He could not but admire his own speed; but when he saw his horns in the water, “Ah, wretched me!” he would have said, but no sound followed the effort. He groaned, and tears flowed down the face which had taken the place of his own. Yet his consciousness remained. What shall he do?—go home to seek the place, or lie hid in the woods? The latter he was afraid, the former he was ashamed, to do. While he hesitated the dogs saw him. First Melampus, a Spartan dog, gave the signal with his bark, then Pamphagus, Dorceus, Lelaps, Theron, Nape, Tigris, and all the rest, rushed after him swifter than the wind. Over rocks and cliffs, through mountain gorges that seemed impracticable, he fled and they followed. Where he had often chased the stag and cheered on his pack, his pack now chased him, cheered on by his huntsmen. He longed to cry out, “I am Actæon; recognize your master!” but the words came not at his will. The air resounded with the bark of the dogs. Presently one fastened on his back, another seized his shoulder. While they held their master, the rest of the pack came up and buried their teeth in his flesh. He groaned,—not in a human voice, yet certainly not in a stag’s,—and falling on his knees, raised his eyes, and would have raised his arms in supplication, if he had had them. His friends and fellow-huntsmen cheered on the dogs, and looked everywhere for Actæon, calling on him to join the sport. At the sound of his name he turned his head, and heard them regret that he should be away. He earnestly wished he was. He would have been well pleased to see the exploits of his dogs, but to feel them was too much. They were all around him, rending and tearing; and it was not till they had torn his life out that the anger of Diana was satisfied.

In Shelley’s poem “Adonais” is the following allusion to the story of Actæon:

“’Midst others of less note came one frail form,

A phantom among men: companionless

As the last cloud of an expiring storm,

Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,

Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,

Actæon-like, and now he fled astray

With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness;

And his own Thoughts, along that rugged way,

Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.”

Stanza 31.

Pyramus and Thisbe

2011-06-17T01:05:00.000-07:00

Pyramus was the handsomest youth, and Thisbe the fairest maiden, in all Babylonia, where Semiramis reigned. Their parents occupied adjoining houses; and neighborhood brought the young people together, and acquaintance ripened into love. They would gladly have married, but their parents forbade. One thing, however, they could not forbid—that love should glow with equal ardor in the bosoms of both. They conversed by signs and glances, and the fire burned more intensely for being covered up. In the wall that parted the two houses there was a crack, caused by some fault in the structure. No one had remarked it before, but the lovers discovered it. What will not love discover! It afforded a passage to the voice; and tender messages used to pass backward and forward through the gap. As they stood, Pyramus on this side, Thisbe on that, their breaths would mingle. “Cruel wall,” they said, “why do you keep two lovers apart? But we will not be ungrateful. We owe you, we confess, the privilege of transmitting loving words to willing ears.” Such words they uttered on different sides of the wall; and when night came and they must say farewell, they pressed their lips upon the wall, she on her side, he on his, as they could come no nearer.

Next morning, when Aurora had put out the stars, and the sun had melted the frost from the grass, they met at the accustomed spot. Then, after lamenting their hard fate, they agreed that next night, when all was still, they would slip away from watchful eyes, leave their dwellings and walk out into the fields; and to insure a meeting, repair to a well-known edifice standing without the city’s bounds, called the Tomb of Ninus, and that the one who came first should await the other at the foot of a certain tree. It was a white mulberry tree, and stood near a cool spring. All was agreed on, and they waited impatiently for the sun to go down beneath the waters and night to rise up from them. Then cautiously Thisbe stole forth, unobserved by the family, her head covered with a veil, made her way to the monument and sat down under the tree. As she sat alone in the dim light of the evening she descried a lioness, her jaws reeking with recent slaughter, approaching the fountain to slake her thirst. Thisbe fled at the sight, and sought refuge in the hollow of a rock. As she fled she dropped her veil. The lioness after drinking at the spring turned to retreat to the woods, and seeing the veil on the ground, tossed and rent it with her bloody mouth.

Pyramus, having been delayed, now approached the place of meeting. He saw in the sand the footsteps of the lion, and the color fled from his cheeks at the sight. Presently he found the veil all rent and bloody. “O hapless girl,” said he, “I have been the cause of thy death! Thou, more worthy of life than I, hast fallen the first victim. I will follow. I am the guilty cause, in tempting thee forth to a place of such peril, and not being myself on the spot to guard thee. Come forth, ye lions, from the rocks, and tear this guilty body with your teeth.” He took up the veil, carried it with him to the appointed tree, and covered it with kisses and with tears. “My blood also shall stain your texture,” said he, and drawing his sword plunged it into his heart. The blood spurted from the wound, and tinged the white mulberries of the tree all red; and sinking into the earth reached the roots, so that the red color mounted through the trunk to the fruit.

By this time Thisbe, still trembling with fear, yet wishing not to disappoint her lover, stepped cautiously forth, looking anxiously for the youth, eager to tell him the danger she had escaped. When she came to the spot and saw the changed color of the mulberries she doubted whether it was the same place. While she hesitated she saw the form of one struggling in the agonies of death. She started back, a shudder ran through her frame as a ripple on the face of the still water when a sudden breeze sweeps over it. But as soon as she recognized her lover, she screamed and beat her breast, embracing the lifeless body, pouring tears into its wounds, and imprinting kisses on the cold lips. “O Pyramus,” she cried, “what has done this? Answer me, Pyramus; it is your own Thisbe that speaks. Hear me, dearest, and lift that drooping head!” At the name of Thisbe Pyramus opened his eyes, then closed them again. She saw her veil stained with blood and the scabbard empty of its sword. “Thy own hand has slain thee, and for my sake,” she said. “I too can be brave for once, and my love is as strong as thine. I will follow thee in death, for I have been the cause; and death which alone could part us shall not prevent my joining thee. And ye, unhappy parents of us both, deny us, let one tomb contain us. And thou, tree, retain the marks of slaughter. Let thy berries still serve for memorials of our blood.” So saying she plunged the sword into her breast. Her parents ratified her wish, the gods also ratified it. The two bodies were buried in one sepulchre, and the tree ever after brought forth purple berries, as it does to this day.

Moore, in the “Sylph’s Ball,” speaking of Davy’s Safety Lamp, is reminded of the wall that separated Thisbe and her lover:

“O for that Lamp’s metallic gauze,

That curtain of protecting wire,

Which Davy delicately draws

Around illicit, dangerous fire!

The wall he sets ’twixt Flame and Air,

(Like that which barred young Thisbe’s bliss,)

Through whose small holes this dangerous pair

May see each other, but not kiss.”

In Mickle’s translation of the “Lusiad” occurs the following allusion to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the metamorphosis of the mulberries. The poet is describing the Island of Love:

“… here each gift Pomona’s hand bestows

In cultured garden, free uncultured flows,

The flavor sweeter and the hue more fair

Than e’er was fostered by the hand of care.

The cherry here in shining crimson glows,

And stained with lovers’ blood, in pendent rows,

The mulberries o’erload the bending boughs.”

If any of our young readers can be so hard-hearted as to enjoy a laugh at the expense of poor Pyramus and Thisbe, they may find an opportunity by turning to Shakspeare’s play of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where it is most amusingly burlesqued.

71 New Ovid Manuscripts

2011-05-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

Experts from Huelva University have discovered 71 unknown manuscripts of Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD). The manuscripts, most of them codices and fragments which were not known to even exist, have been found in different libraries around the world and most of them belong to Ovid’s greatest work, The Metamorphosis.

The professor of Latin Philology at the university, Luis Rivero, commented that these are versions or interpretations of the work which date from ancient times to the modern age, and almost complete the collection of all manuscripts concerning the author and his work, amounting to 538.

This makes Huelva a reference point for researchers of Ovid worldwide.

Tribes of Epirus

2011-05-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

The name Epirus comes from Greek: Ἤπειρος, Ēpeiros (in Doric Greek and the native Northwestern Greek Ἅπειρος, Apeiros), meaning "mainland". Epirus has been occupied since at least Neolithic times by seafarers along the coast and by hunters and shepherds in the interior who brought with them the Greek language. These people buried their leaders in large tumuli containing shaft graves, similar to the Mycenaean tombs, indicating an ancestral link between Epirus and the Mycenean civilization. A number of Mycenaean remains have been found in Epirus, especially at the most important ancient religious sites in the region, the Necromanteion (Oracle of the Dead) on the Acheron river, and the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona.

Molossians

The Molossians Greek , Μολοσσοί were an ancient Greek tribe that inhabited the region of Epirus since the Mycenaean era. The Molossians were part of the League of Epirus until they sided against Rome in the Third Macedonian War 171 BC-168 BC . The result was disastrous with the vengeful Romans enslaving 150,000 of its inhabitants and annexing the region into the Roman Empire.

According to Greek mythology, the Molossians were the descendants of Molossus, one of the three sons of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles and Deidamia. Following the sack of Troy, Neoptolemus and his armies settled in Epirus where they joined with the local population. Molossus inherited the kingdom of Epirus after the death of Helenus, son of Priam and Hecuba of Troy, who had married his erstwhile sister-in-law Andromache after Neoptolemus' death. Plutarch tells us that according to some historians their first king was Phaethon, one of those who came into Epirus with Pelasgus. Plutarch also says, that Deucalion and Pyrrha, having set up the worship of Zeus at Dodona, settled there among the Molossians.

Strabo tells us that the Molossians, along with the Chaonians and Thesprotians, were the most famous among the fourteen tribes of Epirus, who once ruled over the whole region. The Chaonians ruled Epirus at an earlier time and afterwards the Thesprotians and Molossians controlled the region. Plutarch 3 tells us that the Thesprotians, the Chaonians and the Molossians were the three principal clusters of Greek-speaking tribes that had emerged from Epirus and were the most powerful among all other tribes.

The Molossians were also renowned for their vicious hounds, which were used by shepherds to guard their flocks. This is where the canine breed Molossoid, native to Greece, got its name. Virgil tells us that in ancient Greece the heavier Molossian dogs were often used by the Greeks and Romans for hunting canis venaticus and to watch over the house and livestock canis pastoralis . "Never, with them on guard," says Virgil, "need you fear for your stalls a midnight thief, or onslaught of wolves, or Iberian brigands at your back."

Strabo records that the Thesprotians, Molossians, and Macedonians referred to old men as pelioi and old women as peliai lt PIE pel-, 'grey' . Cf. Ancient Greek peleia, "pigeon", so-called because of its dusky grey color. Ancient Greek pelos meant "grey". Their senators were called Peligones.

Chaones

The Chaones according to Strabo were once the most powerful and warlike people of Epirus until the Molossians, in their turn, acquired a preponderating ascendancy over the other clans of that country. In the time of the Peloponnesia war the Chaones differed from their neihbours, in being subject to an aristocratical and not a monarchical government, their annual magistrates being always chosen from a particular family (Thuc. II, 80). Tradition ascribed the origin of their names to Chaonas, the brother of Helenus, who married Andromache after the death of Pyrrhus.

Dexari

Dexari was a tribe of Chaones. They lived ‘next to the Encheleae’ as Hecataeus wrote (FGrH1f103) and held the area which was later called Dassaretis, namely the southern part of the lakeland and the hilly country to the south west of it. Chaones were a group of Greek-speaking tribes and the Dexari or as they were called later the Dassaretae were the most northernly member of this group.

Suliones

Suliones were another Chaonian tribe, named by the poet Rhyanus who is quoted by Steph. Byzantinus (v. Συλίονες). Their name recall to mind the famous Suliotes during the wars for Greek independence.

Thesproti

Thesprotia extended along the coast from the Thyamis beyond the Acheron to the confines of the Cassopaei and in the interior to the boundaries of the territory of Dodona which in ancient times was regarded as a part of Thesprotia.

They were considerd the most ancient from all Epirotic tribes since they are the only one mentioned by Homer (Odys. Ξ.315). Herodotus also affirms that they were the parent stock from whence descended the Thessalians who expelled the Aeolians from the country afterwards know by the name of Thessaly. (VII.176) Thesprotians were governed at first by monarchical system but later according to Thucydides (II.80) neither they nor Chaones were subject to kings.

Cassopaei

Cassopaei were a Thesprotian tribe. Cassopaei reached along the coast as far as the Ambracian gulf. According to Strabo (7.7.5) the Kassopaians were Thesprotians and between 330 – 325 BCE they became members of the Epeirote Federation . The region Kassopeia (Κασσωπία) (Dem. 7.32; Theopom frr 206-7; Ps. Slylax 31-32) or Kassiopaia (Plut. More. 297B) or Kassiopi (Ptol. Geog. 3.14.) was part of Thesprotia.

Athamanians

Athamanians or Athamanes were an ancient tribe that inhabited south-eastern Epirus and west Thessaly. Although regarded as "barbarians" by Strabo and Hecataeus of Miletus, the Athamanians self-identified as Greeks. The existence of myths about Athamas and Ino in Achaean Phthiotis suggests that the Athamanians were settled there before 1600 BC. They were an independent semi-barbarian tribe (in 395 and 355 BC according to Diodorus Siculus) occasionally allies of the Aetolians. Amynander and Theodorus of Athamania are reported kings of the Athamanians.

Amphilochians, Orestae, Pelagones, Elimiotae

Music in Ancient Greece

2011-04-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

Ancient Greek Music remains one of the least illuminated chapters of the History of Greek Culture. Despite the fact that we have access to information concerning the role of music in everyday life, a great deal of significant information concerning the sound and the way it was played remains unknown. The studies of ancient sources reveal that the role of music in ancient Greece was far more complicated than that of music nowadays. Music nowadays is part of our everyday routine and a means of entertainment, there are, however, certain kinds which are considered to be the elite of music and are addressed to the initiated and the music-lovers.

Music in the everyday life of Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece music was an integral part of people’s everyday routine and due to the fact that music was a complicated form of art as well as a cultural expression, it was highly regarded and present in all private and public festivities. Music, Asma-the singing and lyrics - Orchisis – group of dancers as well as the song between the acts -were features of a highly civilized community as well as factors and indicators of a higher quality of life. From the archaic period music gradually assumed a more complicated form and role, the result of this development was that special music competitions were organized in many parts of Ancient Greece. Some of the oldest music competitions ever registered are the “Karnea” in ancient Sparta which was a place were music was highly respected and connected with the training and education of the youth.

Naked men dancing the Pyrichios

After the 6th century music played a significant role in two major festivities known as “Megala Panathinea” and “Megala Dionysia” and was a main reason for Athens to hold a prominent position in terms of cultural development. During those festivities, apart from the music competitions, some very significant kinds of lyric poetry and music emerged, the most significant kind of which was the Ancient Drama.

Except being an important element in both public and private celebrations, music played an important role on unpleasant occasions and it made daily hardships more tolerable. Music was a main feature in celebrations such as weddings, banquets, social gatherings and moments of joy but also a valuable companion in everyday routine. A flute player for instance would accompany the women with his music while they were kneading, the workers during harvest, the oarsmen as well as the soldiers on their way to battle. Music was closely connected with sports and athletic games not only because they included music competitions but because the music would encourage and motivate the athlete to achieve a better performance.

The divine nature of Music

According to the ancient Greeks, music was divine as it assisted in healing both soul and body. It purified and soothed people’s souls and it inspired, encouraged and helped them relax. The above mentioned features justified the presence of Music, Asma and Orchisis in religious festivities such as the “Panathinea” held in Athens.

Music and other Art forms

Music is closely related to other sciences such as mathematics and philosophy thus it was one of the important subjects in young people’s education. Besides, its connection to the theatre and poetry was of major significance. Masterpieces of ancient Greek literature such as the Homeric epics and Ancient Tragedies were preserved thanks to music. It is an indisputable fact that music has made an invaluable contribution to the development and diversity of the Ancient Greek culture.

Sources of the Ancient Greek Music

It was believed that music was not particularly developed compared to other art forms in ancient Greece. This was due to the lack of written sources concerning ancient Greek music. Gradually, our knowledge of the role and the importance of music in ancient Greece were enriched thanks to the systematic research of all relevant sources. Thus, from lyric poetry we get lots of information concerning musical instruments while from literature or historical texts we learn a lot about prominent musicians of the time and their works.

A depiction on pots, mosaics, relieves, murals, coins and statues are an invaluable source of information concerning musical instruments and their evolution from the archaic period to the Roman times. Detailed pot decorations are a rich source of information concerning the form and shape of many instruments about which we would otherwise know nothing. Very few findings of instruments were discovered, mostly flute and rarely fragments of other instruments, such as the lyre.

Elements of ancient Greek music have also been traced in Byzantine and Traditional Greek music by researchers. The most valuable and important sources of information however, are detected and preserved in surviving scores as well as other surviving texts on harmonics such as the texts “Armonika” and “Rythmika Stichia” written by Aristoxenos Tarantinos – perhaps the most distinguished musician of the 4th century B.C.

Surviving Works

The very few surviving scores however are fragmentary, for instance some inscriptions on stones, manuscripts on papyrus etc, therefore they fail to give a full idea of the wealth and grandeur of the ancient Greek music. This music reveals the sense of moderation and harmony which are important features of the Greek civilization. All in all, sixty-one music pieces have survived to our time and if we exclude “Seikilos pillar” none of the surviving texts is complete.

Seikilos pillar

“Seikilos pillar” is the only preserved music text which was found complete. It is a small pillar which dates back to the 2nd century a.C. The poem, which is preserved and is inscribed on the pillar, talks about the true meaning of life and praises the art of quality living. It is a very small composition indicative of ancient Greek music and it is invaluable because of its uniqueness. The pillar is exhibited in the museum in Copenhagen.

The most important preserved text is the “Delphic Hymn”. It is inscribed on pillars and was found in Delphi. These invaluable extracts reveal important information about ancient Greek music. This hymn was presented during the “Pythia” in 128 BC. The pillars with the inscriptions are exhibited in the Delphi museum.

Spectacles of Blood, Primary Sources for Gladiatorial Games

2011-04-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

Seneca

The following letter indicates how by the age of Nero cultured and elevated men were beginning to revolt at the arena butcheries which still delighted the mob.

I turned in to the games one mid-day hoping for a little wit and humor there. I was bitterly disappointed. It was really mere butchery. The morning's show was merciful compared to it. Then men were thrown to lions and to bears: but at midday to the audience. There was no escape for them. The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain. "Kill him! flog him! burn him alive" was the cry: "Why is he such a coward? Why won't he rush on the steel? Why does he fall so meekly? Why won't he die willingly?" Unhappy that I am, how have I deserved that I must look on such a scene as this? Do not, my Lucilius, attend the games, I pray you. Either you will be corrupted by the multitude, or, if you show disgust, be hated by them. So stay away.

Seneca, Epistles 7

Does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human. O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. he then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery, offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname was.

The shortness of Life, xiii. 6-8

Cicero

It will be delightful if you come to see us here. You will find that Tyrannio has made a wonderfully good arrangement of my books, the remains of which are better than I had expected. Still, I wish you would send me a couple of your library slaves for Tyrannio to employ as gluers, and in other subordinate work, and tell them to get some fine parchment to make title pieces, which you Greeks, I think, call "sillybi." But all this is only if not inconvenient to you. In any case, be sure you come yourself, if you can halt for a while in such a place, and can persuade Pilia to accompany you. For that is only fair, and Tulia is anxious that she should come. My word! You have purchased a fine troop! Your gladiators, I am told, fight superbly. If you had chosen to let them out you would have cleared your expenses by the last two spectacles. But we will talk about this later on. Be sure to come, and, as you love me, see about the library slaves.

To Atticus (Returning from Epirus) Antium, April, 56 B.C.

Just look at the gladiators, either debased men or foreigners, and consider the blows they endure! Consider how they who have been well-disciplined prefer to accept a blow than ignominiously avoid it! How often it is made clear that they consider nothing other than the satisfaction of their master or the people! Even when they are covered with wounds they send a messenger to their master to inquire his will. If they have given satisfaction to their masters, they are pleased to fall. What even mediocre gladiator ever groans, ever alters the expression on his face? Which one of them acts shamefully, either standing or falling? And which of them, even when he does succumb, ever contracts his neck when ordered to receive the blow?

Tusc. 2.41

And yet I realize that in our country, even in the good old times, it had become a settled custom to expect magnificent entertainments from the very best men in their year of aedileship. So both Publius Crassus, who was not merely surnamed "The Rich" but was rich in fact, gave splendid games in his aedileship; and a little later Lucius Crassus (with Quintus Mucius, the most unpretentious man in the world, as his colleague) gave most magnificent entertainments in his aedileship. Then came Gaius Claudius, the son of Appius, and, after him, many others-the Luculli, Hortensius, and Silanus. Publius Lentulus, however, in the year of my consulship, eclipsed all that had gone before him, and Scaurus emulated him. And my friend Pompey's exhibitions in his second consulship were the most magnificent of all. And so you see what I think about all this sort of thing. 58 XVII. Still we should avoid any suspicion of penuriousness. Mamercus was a very wealthy man, and his refusal of the aedileship was the cause of his defeat for the consulship. If, therefore, such entertainment is demanded by the people, men of right judgment must at least consent to furnish it, even if they do not like the idea. But in so doing they should keep within their means, as I myself did. They should likewise afford such entertainment, if gifts of money to the people are to be the means of securing on some occasion some more important or more useful object.

De Officiis

Tacitus

And indeed there are characteristic and specific vices in this city, which seem to me to be practically born in the womb: the obsession with actors and the passion for gladiatorial shows and horse racing. How much room does a mind preoccupied with such things have for the noble arts?

Tacitus, Dial. 29

Cassius Dio

During these same days Pompey dedicated the theatre in which we take pride even at the present time. In it he provided an entertainment consisting of music and gymnastic contests, and in the Circus a horse-race and the slaughter of many wild beasts of all kinds. Indeed, five hundred lions were used up in five days, and eighteen elephants fought against men in heavy armour. Some of these beasts were killed at the time and others a little later. For some of them, contrary to Pompey's wish, were pitied by the people when, after being wounded and ceasing to fight, they walked about with their trunks raised toward heaven, lamenting so bitterly as to give rise to the report that they did so not by mere chance, but were crying out against the oaths in which they had trusted when they crossed over from Africa, and were calling on Heaven to avenge them. For it is said that they would not set foot upon the ships before they received a pledge under oath from their drivers that they should suffer no harm. Whether this is really so or not I do not know;....

Dio 39.38.1-4

[22] So after completing the new forum and the temple to Venus, as the founder of his family, he [Julius Caesar] dedicated them at this very time and in their honour instituted many contests of all kinds. He built a kind of hunting-theatre of wood, which was called an amphitheatre from the fact that it had seats all around without any stage. In honour of this and of his daughter he exhibited combats of wild beats and gladiators; but anyone who cared to record their number would find his task a burden without being able, in all probability, to present the truth; for all such matters are regularly exaggerated in a spirit of boastfulness. I shall accordingly pass over this and other like events.....

[23]...As for the men, he not only pitted them one against another singly in the Forum, as was customary, but he also made them fight together in companies in the Circus, horsemen against horsemen, men on foot against others on foot, and sometimes both kinds together in equal numbers. There was even a fight between men seated on elephants, forty in number. Finally he produced a naval battle; not on the sea nor on a lake, but on land; for he hollowed out a certain tract on the Campus Martius and after flooding it introduced ships into it. In all the contests the captives and those condemned to die took part; yet some even of the knights, and, not to mention others, the son of one who had been praetor fought in single combat. Indeed a senator named Fulvius Sepinus desired to contend in full armour, but he was prevented; for Caesar deprecated that spectacle at any time, though he did permit the knights to contend. The patrician boys went through the equestrian exercise called "Troy" according to ancient custom, and the young men of the same rank, contended in chariots.

[24]He was blamed, indeed, for the great number of those slain, on the ground that he himself had not become sated with bloodshed and was further exhibiting to the populace symbols of their own miseries; but much more faith was found because he had expended countless sums on all that array....In order that the sun might not annoy any of the spectators, he had curtains stretched over them made of silk, according to some accounts.

Dio 43.22-24

Most that he did was not characterized by anything noteworthy, but in dedicating the hunting theatre [The Amphiteatrum Flavium, later known as the Colosseum] and the baths that that bear his name he produced many remarkable spectacles. There was a battle between cranes and also between four elephants; animals both tame and wild were slain to the number of nine thousand; and women (not those of any prominence, however) took part in despatching them.

As for the men, several fought in single combat and several groups contended together both in infantry and naval battles. For Titus suddenly filled this same theatre with water and brought in horses and bulls and some other domesticated animals that had been taught to behave in the liquid element just as on land.

He also brought in people on ships, who engaged in a sea-fight there, impersonating the Corcyreans and Corinthians; and others gave a similar exhibition from outside the city in the grove of Gaius and Lucius, a place which Augustus had once excavated for this very purpose. There, too, on the first day, there was a gladiatorial exhibition and wild-beast hunt, the lake in front of the images having first been covered over with a platform of planks and wooden stands erected around it.

On the second day there was a horse-race, and on the third day a naval battle between three thousand men, followed by an infantry battle. The "Athenians" conquered the "Syracusans" (these were the names the combatants used), made a landing on the islet [i.e., Ortygia] and assaulted and captured a wall that had been constructed around the monument. These were the spectacles that were offered, and they continued for a hundred days; but Titus also furnished some things that were of practical use to the people.

He would throw down into the theatre from aloft little wooden balls variously inscribed, one designating some article of food, another clothing, another a silver vessel or perhaps a gold one, or again horses, pack-animals, cattle or slaves. Those who seized them were to carry them to the dispensers of the bounty, from whom they would receive the article named.

Dio 66.25.1-5

Pliny the Elder

19. Fenestella states that the first elephant fought in the circus at Rome in the curule aedileship of Claudius Pulcher and the consulship of Marcus Antonius and Aulus Postumius, 99 B.C., and also that the first fight of an elephant against bulls was twenty years later in the curule aedileship of the Luculli.

20. Also in Pompey's second consulship at the dedication of the Temple of Venus Victrix, twenty, or, as some record, seventeen, fought in the Circus, their opponents being Gaetulians armed with javelins, one of the animals putting up a marvelous fight - its feet being disabled by wounds it crawled against the hordes of the enemy on its knees, snatching their shields from them and throwing them into the air, and these as they fell delighted the spectators by the curves they described, as if they were being thrown by a skilled juggler and not by an infuriated wild animal. There was also a marvelous occurrence in the case of another, which was killed by a single blow, as the javelin striking it under the eye had reached the vital parts of the head.

21. The whole band attempted to burst through the iron palisading by which they were enclosed and caused considerable trouble among the public. Owing to this, when subsequently Caesar in his dictatorship [49 b.c.] was going to exhibit a similar show he surrounded the arena with channels of water; these the emperor Nero removed when adding special places for the Knighthood. But Pompey's elephants when they had lost all hope of escape tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing, so much to the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honour, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey for which he soon afterwards paid the penalty. Elephants also fought for the dictator Caesar in his third consulship [46 b.c.], twenty being matched against 500 foot soldiers, and on a second occasion an equal number carrying castles each with a garrison of 60 men, who fought a pitched battle against the same number of infantry as on the former occasion and an equal number of cavalry; and subsequently for the emperors Claudius and Nero elephants versus men single-handed, as the crowning exploit of the gladiators' careers.

Pliny HN 7.19-22

We did the kinds of things which later generations believe are the stuff of legend. Caesar who was later dictator, first, when he was aedile, used in the funeral games for his ancestors, every ostentation, beginning with the silvered sand; then for the first time the condemned in silver array attacked the beasts, which even now they emulate in the provinces. C. Antonius produced a play on a silver stage, L. Murena did the same. The Emperor Gaius brought a stage into the Circus in which the weights were silver

Pliny. HN 33.53

Suetonius

XLVII. While emperor he constructed no magnificent public works, for the only ones which he undertook, the temple of Augustus and the restoration of Pompey's theatre, he left unfinished after so many years. He gave no public shows at all, and very seldom attended those given by others, for fear that some request would be made of him, especially after he was forced to buy the freedom of a comic actor named Actius. Having relieved the neediness of a few senators, he avoided the necessity of further aid by declaring that he would help no others unless they proved to the Senate that there were legitimate causes for their condition. Therefore diffidence and a sense of shame kept many from applying, among them Hortalus, grandson of Quintus Hortensius the orator, who though of very limited means had begotten four children with the encouragement of Augustus.

Suet. Tib. 47.1: on Tiberius' reluctance to host gladiatorial shows

XXXIX. He gave entertainments of divers kinds: a combat of gladiators and also stage-plays in every ward all over the city, performed too by actors of all languages, as well as races in the circus, athletic contests, and a sham sea-fight. In the gladiatorial contest in the Forum Furius Leptinus, a man of praetorian stock, and Quintus Calpenus, a former senator and pleader at the bar, fought to a finish. A Pyrrhic dance was performed by the sons of the princes of Asia and Bithynia. During the plays Decimus Laberius, a Roman eques, acted a farce of his own composition, and having been presented with five hundred thousand sesterces and a gold ring [in token of his restoration to the rank of eques, which he forfeited by appearing on the stage], passed from the stage through the orchestra and took his place in the fourteen rows [the first fourteen rows above the orchestra, reserved for the equites by the law of L. Roscius Otho, tribune of the plebeians, in 67 B.C.]. For the races the circus was lengthened at either end and a broad canal was dug all about it; then young men of the highest rank drove four-horse and two-horse chariots and rode pairs of horses, vaulting from one to the other. The game called Troy was performed by two troops, of younger and of older boys. Combats with wild beasts were presented on five successive days, and last of all there was a battle between two opposing armies, in which five hundred foot-soldiers, twenty elephants, and thirty horsemen engaged on each side. To make room for this, the goals were taken down and in their place two camps were pitched over against each other. The athletic competitions lasted for three days in a temporary stadium built for the purpose in the region of the Campus Martius. For the naval battle a pool was dug in the lesser Codeta and there was a contest of ships of two, three, and four banks of oars, belonging to the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, manned by a large force of fighting men. Such a throng flocked to all these shows from every quarter, that many strangers had to lodge in tents pitched in the streets or along the roads, and the press was often such that many were crushed to death, including two senators.

Suet. Iul. 39

X. When aedile [65 B.C.], Caesar decorated not only the Comitium and the Forum with its adjacent basilicas, but the Capitol as well, building temporary colonnades for the display of a part of his material. He exhibited combats with wild beasts and stageplays too, both with his colleague and independently. The result was that Caesar alone took all the credit even for what they spent in common, and his colleague Marcus Bibulus openly said that his was the fate of Pollux: "For," said he, "just as the temple erected in the Forum to the twin brethren, bears only the name of Castor, so the joint liberality of Caesar and myself is credited to Caesar alone." Caesar gave a gladiatorial show besides, but with somewhat fewer pairs of combatants than he had purposed; for the huge band which he assembled from all quarters so terrified his opponents, that a bill was passed limiting the number of gladiators which anyone was to be allowed to keep in the city.

XXVI. Within this same space of time he lost first his mother, then his daughter, and soon afterwards his grandchild. Meanwhile, as the community was aghast at the murder of Publius Clodius, the senate had voted that only one consul should be chosen, and expressly named Gnaeus Pompeius. When the tribunes planned to make him Pompeius' colleague, Caesar urged them rather to propose to the people that he be permitted to stand for a second consulship without coming to Rome, when the term of his governorship drew near its end, to prevent his being forced for the sake of the office to leave his province prematurely and without finishing the war. On the granting of this, aiming still higher and flushed with hope, he neglected nothing in the way of lavish expenditure or of favors to anyone, either in his public capacity or privately. He began a forum with the proceeds of his spoils, the ground for which cost more than a hundred million sesterces. He announced a combat of gladiators and a feast for the people in memory of his daughter, a thing quite without precedent. To raise the expectation of these events to the highest possible pitch, he had the material for the banquet prepared in part by his own household, although he had let contracts to the markets as well. He gave orders too that whenever famous gladiators fought without winning the favor of the people [when ordinarily they would be put to death], they should be rescued by force and kept for him. He had the novices trained, not in a gladiatorial school by professionals, but in private houses by Roman knights and even by senators who were skilled in arms, earnestly beseeching them, as is shown by his own letters, to give the recruits individual attention and personally direct their exercises. He doubled the pay of the legions for all time. Whenever grain was plentiful, he distributed it to them without stint or measure, and now and then gave each man a slave from among the captives.

Suet. Iul. 10.2, 26.2

Augustus

22 Three times I gave shows of gladiators under my name and five times under the name of my sons and grandsons; in these shows about 10,000 men fought. Twice I furnished under my name spectacles of athletes gathered from everywhere, and three times under my grandson's name. I celebrated games under my name four times, and furthermore in the place of other magistrates twenty-three times. As master of the college I celebrated the secular games for the college of the Fifteen, with my colleague Marcus Agrippa, when Gaius Furnius and Gaius Silanus were consuls (17 B.C.E.). Consul for the thirteenth time (2 B.C.E.), I celebrated the first games of Mas, which after that time thereafter in following years, by a senate decree and a law, the consuls were to celebrate. Twenty-six times, under my name or that of my sons and grandsons, I gave the people hunts of African beasts invthe circus, in the open, or in the amphitheater; in them about 3,500 beasts were killed.

23 I gave the people a spectacle of a naval battle, in the place across the Tiber where the grove of the Caesars is now, with the ground excavated in length 1,800 feet, in width 1,200, in which thirty beaked ships, biremes or triremes, but many smaller, fought among themselves; in these ships about 3,000 men fought in addition to the rowers.

RG, 22-23 Deeds of Augustus

Pliny the Younger

XCVII: To Calvisius

I have spent these several days past, in reading and writing, with the most pleasing tranquillity imaginable. You will ask, "How that can possibly be in the midst of Rome?" It was the time of celebrating the Circensian games: an entertainment for which I have not the least taste. They have no novelty, no variety to recommend them, nothing, in short, one would wish to see twice. It does the more surprise me therefore that so many thousand people should be possessed with the childish passion of desiring so often to see a parcel of horses gallop, and men standing upright in their chariots. If, indeed, it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretence of reason for it. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and contest, the different parties were to change colours, their different partisans would change sides, and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following with their eyes, as far as they could see, and shouting out their names with all their might. Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the colour of a paltry tunic! And this not only with the common crowd (more contemptible than the dress they espouse), but even with serious-thinking people. When I observe such men thus insatiably fond of so silly, so low, so uninteresting, so common an entertainment, I congratulate myself on my indifference to these pleasures: and am glad to employ the leisure of this season upon my books, which others throw away upon the most idle occupations. Farewell.

Plin. Ep. 9.6: on chariot racing (selected letters)

Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis

Meantime the solemn Idaen rite of the Megalesian napkin is being held; there sits the Praetor in his triumphal state, the prey of horseflesh; and (if I may say so without offense to the vast unnumbered mob) all Rome to-day is in the Circus. A roar strikes upon my ear which tells me that the Green has won; for had it lost, Rome would be as sad and dismayed as when the Consuls were vanquished in the dust of Cannae. Such sights are for the young, whom it befits to shout and make bold wagers with a smart damsel by their side; but let my shrivelled skin drink in the vernal sun, and escape the toga.

Juv. 11.193-204: on chariot racing

Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestoed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things - Bread and Games!

Juv. 10.77-80: on the people and politics

Ausonius

The Romans staged spectacles of fighting gladiators not merely at their festivals and in their theatres, borrowing the custom from the Etruscans, but also at their banquets...some would invite their friends to dinner...that they might witness two or three pairs of contestants in gladiatorial combat...when sated with dining and drink, they called in the gladiators. No sooner did one have his throat cut than the masters applauded with delight at this fight.

ECL. 23.33-7 Athenaeus, 4.153f-154a

Valerius Maximus

The practice of weapons training was given to soldiers by P. Rutilius, consul with C. Mallis. For he, following the example of no previous general, with teachers summoned from the gladiatorial training school of C. Aurelus Scaurus, implanted in the legions a more sophisticated method of avoiding and dealing a blow and mixed bravery with skill and skill back again with virtue so that skill became stronger by bravery's passion and passion became more wary with the knowledge of this art.

2.3.2

Vegetius

The ancients, we read, trained their recruits in this manner: They wove rounded shields from switches in the shape of ribbing, so that the weight of the ribbing would be double the weight an ordinary shield would have. In the same way, they gave wooden practice swords of almost double the ordinary weight as swords to the recruits. In this way, not only in the morning, but even after noon they practiced against stakes. For the use of stakes, not only for soldiers, but even for gladiators is very common. Neither the arena nor the field of battle ever pronounced a man untested by weapons acceptable unless he was taught, having excercised diligently, at the stake. Instead, individual stakes were fixed into the ground by individual recruits so that they could not sway and stood up six feet tall. Against this stake, as if against a foe, the recruit with the weighted shield and sword practiced as if with a real shield and sword - now as though he were attacking the head and face, now as though threatening from the side, and from time to time he would try to attack the thighs and legs from below, he would move back, jump forward, and on it, as if against an actual foe, so that he tested the stake with every blow, with every art of making war. In this excercise, this precaution was observed - that the recruit moved forward to deliver a blow in no way by which he himslef would open himself to one.

Mil. 1.11 [FLAVI VEGETI RENATI VIRI INLUSTRIS COMITIS EPITOMA REI MILITARIS LIBRI IIII]

Plutarch

A show of gladiators was to be exhibited before the people in the market-place, and most of the magistrates erected scaffolds round about, with an intention of letting them for advantage. Caius commanded them to take down their scaffolds, that the poor people might see the sport without paying anything. But nobody obeying these orders of his, he gathered together a body of labourers, who worked for him, and overthrew all the scaffolds the very night before the contest was to take place. So that by the next morning the market-place was cleared, and the common people had an opportunity of seeing the pastime. In this, the populace thought he had acted the part of a man; but he much disobliged the tribunes his colleagues, who regarded it as a piece of violent and presumptuous interference.

Plutarch, C. Gracch, 12.3-4

He was so profuse in his expenses that, before he had any public employment, he was in debt thirteen hundred talents, and many thought that by incurring such expense to be popular he changed a solid good for what would prove but a short and uncertain return; but in truth he was purchasing what was of the greatest value at an inconsiderable rate. When he was made surveyor of the Appian Way, he disbursed, besides the public money, a great sum out of his private purse; and when he was aedile, he provided such a number of gladiators, that he entertained the people with three hundred and twenty single combats, and by his great liberality and magnificence in theatrical shows, in processions, and public feastings, he threw into the shade all the attempts that had been made before him, and gained so much upon the people, that every one was eager to find out new offices and new honours for him in return for his munificence.

Caesar, upon his return to Rome, did not omit to pronounce before the people a magnificent account of his victory, telling them that he had subdued a country which would supply the public every year with two hundred thousand attic bushels of corn and three million pounds' weight of oil. He then led three triumphs for Egypt, Pontus, and Africa, the last for the victory over, not Scipio, but King Juba, as it was professed, whose little son was then carried in the triumph, the happiest captive that ever was, who, of a barbarian Numidian, came by this means to obtain a place among the most learned historians of Greece. After the triumphs, he distributed rewards to his soldiers, and treated the people with feasting and shows. He entertained the whole people together at one feast, where twenty-two thousand dining couches were laid out; and he made a display of gladiators, and of battles by sea, in honour, as he said, of his daughter Julia, though she had been long since dead. When these shows were over, an account was taken of the people who, from three hundred and twenty thousand, were now reduced to one hundred and fifty thousand. So great a waste had the civil war made in Rome alone, not to mention what the other parts of Italy and the provinces suffered.

Plutarch, J. Caes, 5.4

Pella curse tablet - katadesmos

2011-04-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

The Pella curse tablet is a text written in a distinct Doric Greek idiom, found in Pella, the ancient capital of Macedon, in 1986. Ιt contains a curse or magic spell (Greek: κατάδεσμος, katadesmos) inscribed on a lead scroll, dating to first half of the 4th century BC (c. 375-350 BC). It was published in the Hellenic Dialectology Journal in 1993. It is one of four texts found until today that might represent a local dialectal form of ancient Greek in Macedonia, all of them identifiable as Doric. These confirm that a Doric Greek dialect was spoken in Macedonia, as was previously expected from the West Greek forms of names found in Macedonia. As a result, the Pella curse tablet has been forwarded as an argument that the Ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialects.

Interpretation

The tablet is also described as a "mixed curse" due to the supplicative nature of the appeal. For example the word ΕΡΗΜΑ or "abandoned" is quite common in appeals to divine powers. It is a magic spell or love charm written by a woman, possibly named Dagina (Ancient Greek: Δαγίνα), whose lover Dionysophōn (Διονυσοφῶν, gen.: Διονυσοφῶντος) is apparently about to marry Thetima (Θετίμα, "she who honors the gods"; the standard Attic Greek form is Theotimē - Θεοτίμη). She invokes "Makron and the demons" (parkattithemai makrōni kai [tois] daimosi - παρκαττίθεμαι μάκρωνι καὶ [τοῖς] δαίμοσι; in Attic, παρκαττίθεμαι is parakatatithemai - παρακατατίθεμαι) to cause Dionysophon to marry her instead of Thetima, and never to marry another woman unless she herself recovers and unrolls the scroll and for her to grow old by the side of Dionysophon.

Katadesmoi or defixiones were spells written on non-perishable material, such as lead, stone or baked clay, and were secretly buried to ensure their physical integrity, which would then guarantee the permanence of their intended effects. The language is a distinct form of North-West Greek, and the low social status of its writer, as (arguably) evidenced by her vocabulary and belief in magic, strongly hint that a unique form of West Greek was spoken by lay people in Pella at the time the tablet was written. This should not, however, be taken to indicate that only those of middling or low social status practiced magic in the Ancient Greek world: quite wealthy individuals also used lead katadesmoi (curse tablets) for love, revenge, and to bind their opponents in athletic contests.

Text and translation

Greek

1. [ΘΕΤΙ]ΜΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΦΩΝΤΟΣ ΤΟ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΝ ΓΑΜΟΝ ΚΑΤΑΓΡΑΦΩ ΚΑΙ ΤΑΝ ΑΛΛΑΝ ΠΑΣΑΝ ΓΥ
2. [ΝΑΙΚ]ΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΧΗΡΑΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΘΕΝΩΝ ΜΑΛΙΣΤΑ ΔΕ ΘΕΤΙΜΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΚΑΤΤΙΘΕΜΑΙ ΜΑΚΡΩΝΙ ΚΑΙ
3. [ΤΟΙΣ] ΔΑΙΜΟΣΙ ΚΑΙ ΟΠΟΚΑ ΕΓΟ ΤΑΥΤΑ ΔΙΕΛΕΞΑΙΜΙ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΑΓΝΟΙΗΝ ΠΑΛLΙΝ ΑΝΟΡΟΞΑΣΑ
4. [ΤΟΚΑ] ΓΑΜΑΙ ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΦΩΝΤΑ ΠΡΟΤΕΡΟΝ ΔΕ ΜΗ ΜΗ ΓΑΡ ΛΑΒΟΙ ΑΛΛΑΝ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΑ ΑΛΛ Η ΕΜΕ
5. [ΕΜΕ Δ]Ε ΣΥΝΚΑΤΑΓΗΡΑΣΑΙ ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΦΩΝΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΜΗΔΕΜΙΑΝ ΑΛΛΑΝ ΙΚΕΤΙΣ ΥΜΩΝ ΓΙΝΟ
6. [ΜΑΙ ΦΙΛ]ΑΝ ΟΙΚΤΙΡΕΤΕ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΕΣ ΦΙΛ[Ο]Ι ΔΑΓΙΝΑΓΑΡΙΜΕ ΦΙΛΩΝ ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΡΗΜΑ ΑΛΛΑ
7. [....]Α ΦΥΛΑΣΣΕΤΕ ΕΜΙΝ Ο[Π]ΩΣ ΜΗ ΓΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΤΑ[Υ]ΤΑ ΚΑΙ ΚΑΚΑ ΚΑΚΩΣ ΘΕΤΙΜΑ ΑΠΟΛΗΤΑΙ
8. [....]ΑΛ[-].ΥΝΜ .. ΕΣΠΛΗΝ ΕΜΟΣ ΕΜΕ ΔΕ [Ε]Υ[Δ]ΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΚΑΙ ΜΑΚΑΡΙΑΝ ΓΕΝΕΣΤΑΙ
9. [-]ΤΟ[.].[-].[..]..Ε.Ε.Ω[?]Α.[.]Ε..ΜΕΓΕ [-]

English

1. Of [Theti]ma and Dionysophon the ritual wedding and the marriage I bind by a written spell, and of all other
2. wo[men], widows and maidens, but of Thetima in particular, and I entrust upon Makron* and
3. [the] demons. And that only whenever I dig out and unroll and re-read this,
4. [then] may they wed Dionysophon, but not before; and may he never wed any woman but me;
5. and may [I] grow old with Dionysophon, and no one else. I [am] your supplicant:
6. Have pity on [Phil?]a*, dear demons, for I am Dagina* of all my dear ones and abandoned.
7. But please keep this for my sake so that these events do not happen and wretched Thetima perishes miserably
8. but let me become happy and blessed.

Points of interpretation

"Makron" (line 2) is most probably the name of the dead man in whose grave the tablet was deposited. This was commonly done in the belief that the deceased would "convey" the message to the spirits of the Underworld (the "demons" in lines 3 and 6).

The missing word in line 6 between "I am your supplicant" and "have pity" (here reconstructed as [Phil?]a) is carved at the edge of the tablet and the only things we can read of it are that it is a short word that ends in-AN. "PHILAN" is a likely reconstruction, but by no means the only one possible. If true, the word "PHILAN" could equally well be either the personal name "Phila" or the feminine adjective "phila", "friend" or "dear one". In the latter case, an alternative reading of line 6 would be: "Have pity on your dear one, dear demons". In the former case, a personal name would be perfectly placed but, as the name of the person who wrote the curse is not mentioned elsewhere, it is impossible to know with certainty what the missing word is.

The word "DAGINA" (line 6) is inexplicable and previously unattested, even as a personal name. The alternative has been suggested by Dubois, that it is a misspelling, and that the writer intended to write "dapina" (the difference between Γ and Π being a single stroke). If true, this may mean that dapina is an (also unattested) Macedonian rendering of what would be written "ταπεινή", tapeinē (humble, lowly, brought low), in standard Attic. In this case the inscription reads: "for I am lowly and abandoned by all my dear ones" etc.

Dating

According to D. R. Jordan (Duke University), the tablet has been dated to the "Mid-IV [century] or slightly earlier".

Significance

The discovery of the Pella curse tablet, according to Olivier Masson, substantiates the view that the ancient Macedonian language was a form of North-West Greek:

"Yet in contrast with earlier views which made of it {i.e. Macedonian} an Aeolic dialect (O. Hoffmann compared Thessalian) we must by now think of a link with North-West Greek (Locrian, Aetolian, Phocidian, Epirote). This view is supported by the recent discovery at Pella of a curse tablet (4th cent. BC), which may well be the first 'Macedonian' text attested (provisional publication by E. Voutyras; cf. the Bulletin Epigraphique in Rev. Et. Grec. 1994, no. 413); the text includes an adverb "opoka" which is not Thessalian."

Of the same opinion is James L. O'Neil's (University of Sydney) presentation at the 2005 Conference of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies, entitled "Doric Forms in Macedonian Inscriptions" (abstract):

"A fourth‐century BC curse tablet from Pella shows word forms which are clearly Doric, but a different form of Doric from any of the west Greek dialects of areas adjoining Macedon. Three other, very brief, fourth century inscriptions are also indubitably Doric. These show that a Doric dialect was spoken in Macedon, as we would expect from the West Greek forms of Greek names found in Macedon. And yet later Macedonian inscriptions are in Koine avoiding both Doric forms and the Macedonian voicing of consonants. The native Macedonian dialect had become unsuitable for written documents."

Sources

Bloomer, Martin (2005). The Contest of Language: Before and Beyond Nationalism. University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 0268021902.
Curbera, Jaime; Jordan, David (2002-2003). "Curse Tablets from Pydna". Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (Duke University) 43 (2): 109–128. ISSN 00173916.
Damon, Cynthia; Miller, John F.; Myers, K. Sara; Courtney, Edward (2002). Vertis in usum: Studies in Honor of Edward Courtney. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3598777108.
Dubois, Laurent (1995). "Une Tablette de Malediction de Pella: S’Agit-il du Premier Texte Macédonien". Revue des Études Grecques 108: 190–197.
Fantuzzi, Marco; Hunter, Richard L. (2004). Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521835119.
Fortson, Benjamin W. (2009). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 1405188960.
Gager, John G. (1999). Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0195134826.
Jordan, D. R. (2000). "New Greek Curse Tablets (1985–2000)". Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (Duke University) 41: 5–46.
Masson, Olivier; Dubois, Laurent (2000). Onomastica Graeca Selecta. Librairie Droz. ISBN 2600004351.
Masson, Olivier (1996). Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
Voutiras, Emmanuel (1998). Dionysophōntos Gamoi: Marital Life and Magic in Fourth Century Pella. J.C. Gieben. ISBN 9050634079.

Apollo and Daphne

2011-04-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

The slime with which the earth was covered by the waters of the flood produced an excessive fertility, which called forth every variety of production, both bad and good. Among the rest, Python, an enormous serpent, crept forth, the terror of the people, and lurked in the caves of Mount Parnassus. Apollo slew him with his arrows—weapons which he had not before used against any but feeble animals, hares, wild goats, and such game. In commemoration of this illustrious conquest he instituted the Pythian games, in which the victor in feats of strength, swiftness of foot, or in the chariot race was crowned with a wreath of beech leaves; for the laurel was not yet adopted by Apollo as his own tree.

The famous statue of Apollo called the Belvedere represents the god after this victory over the serpent Python. To this Byron alludes in his “Childe Harold,” iv., 161:

“…The lord of the unerring bow,

The god of life, and poetry, and light,

The Sun, in human limbs arrayed, and brow

All radiant from his triumph in the fight.

The shaft has just been shot; the arrow bright

With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye

And nostril, beautiful disdain, and might

And majesty flash their full lightnings by,

Developing in that one glance the Deity.”

Apollo and Daphne

Daphne was Apollo’s first love. It was not brought about by accident, but by the malice of Cupid. Apollo saw the boy playing with his bow and arrows; and being himself elated with his recent victory over Python, he said to him, “What have you to do with warlike weapons, saucy boy? Leave them for hands worthy of them. Behold the conquest I have won by means of them over the vast serpent who stretched his poisonous body over acres of the plain! Be content with your torch, child, and kindle up your flames, as you call them, where you will, but presume not to meddle with my weapons.” Venus’s boy heard these words, and rejoined, “Your arrows may strike all things else, Apollo, but mine shall strike you.” So saying, he took his stand on a rock of Parnassus, and drew from his quiver two arrows of different workmanship, one to excite love, the other to repel it. The former was of gold and sharp pointed, the latter blunt and tipped with lead. With the leaden shaft he struck the nymph Daphne, the daughter of the river god Peneus, and with the golden one Apollo, through the heart. Forthwith the god was seized with love for the maiden, and she abhorred the thought of loving. Her delight was in woodland sports and in the spoils of the chase. Many lovers sought her, but she spurned them all, ranging the woods, and taking no thought of Cupid nor of Hymen. Her father often said to her, “Daughter, you owe me a son-in-law; you owe me grandchildren.” She, hating the thought of marriage as a crime, with her beautiful face tinged all over with blushes, threw her arms around her father’s neck, and said, “Dearest father, grant me this favor, that I may always remain unmarried, like Diana.” He consented, but at the same time said, “Your own face will forbid it.”

Apollo loved her, and longed to obtain her; and he who gives oracles to all the world was not wise enough to look into his own fortunes. He saw her hair flung loose over her shoulders, and said, “If so charming in disorder, what would it be if arranged?” He saw her eyes bright as stars; he saw her lips, and was not satisfied with only seeing them. He admired her hands and arms, naked to the shoulder, and whatever was hidden from view he imagined more beautiful still. He followed her; she fled, swifter than the wind, and delayed not a moment at his entreaties. “Stay,” said he, “daughter of Peneus; I am not a foe. Do not fly me as a lamb flies the wolf, or a dove the hawk. It is for love I pursue you. You make me miserable, for fear you should fall and hurt yourself on these stones, and I should be the cause. Pray run slower, and I will follow slower. I am no clown, no rude peasant. Jupiter is my father, and I am lord of Delphos and Tenedos, and know all things, present and future. I am the god of song and the lyre. My arrows fly true to the mark; but, alas! an arrow more fatal than mine has pierced my heart! I am the god of medicine, and know the virtues of all healing plants. Alas! I suffer a malady that no balm can cure!

The nymph continued her flight, and left his plea half uttered. And even as she fled she charmed him. The wind blew her garments, and her unbound hair streamed loose behind her. The god grew impatient to find his wooings thrown away, and, sped by Cupid, gained upon her in the race. It was like a hound pursuing a hare, with open jaws ready to seize, while the feebler animal darts forward, slipping from the very grasp. So flew the god and the virgin—he on the wings of love, and she on those of fear. The pursuer is the more rapid, however, and gains upon her, and his panting breath blows upon her hair. Her strength begins to fail, and, ready to sink, she calls upon her father, the river god: “Help me, Peneus! open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!” Scarcely had she spoken, when a stiffness seized all her limbs; her bosom began to be enclosed in a tender bark; her hair became leaves; her arms became branches; her foot stuck fast in the ground, as a root; her face became a tree-top, retaining nothing of its former self but its beauty. Apollo stood amazed. He touched the stem, and felt the flesh tremble under the new bark. He embraced the branches, and lavished kisses on the wood. The branches shrank from his lips. “Since you cannot be my wife,” said he, “you shall assuredly be my tree. I will wear you for my crown; I will decorate with you my harp and my quiver; and when the great Roman conquerors lead up the triumphal pomp to the Capitol, you shall be woven into wreaths for their brows. And, as eternal youth is mine, you also shall be always green, and your leaf know no decay.” The nymph, now changed into a Laurel tree, bowed its head in grateful acknowledgement.

That Apollo should be the god both of music and poetry will not appear strange, but that medicine should also be assigned to his province, may. The poet Armstrong, himself a physician, thus accounts for it:

“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,

Expels diseases, softens every pain;

And hence the wise of ancient days adored

One power of physic, melody, and song.”

The story of Apollo and Daphne is often alluded to by the poets. Waller applies it to the case of one whose amatory verses, though they did not soften the heart of his mistress, yet won for the poet wide-spread fame:

“Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,

Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain.

All but the nymph that should redress his wrong,

Attend his passion and approve his song.

Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise,

He caught at love and filled his arms with bays.”

The following stanza from Shelley’s “Adonais” alludes to Byron’s early quarrel with the reviewers:

“The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;

The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead;

The vultures, to the conqueror’s banner true,

Who feed where Desolation first has fed,

And whose wings rain contagion: how they fled,

When like Apollo, from his golden bow,

The Pythian of the age one arrow sped

And smiled! The spoilers tempt no second blow;

They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them as they go.”

Life in Minoan Crete

2011-04-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Minoan civilisation became famous at the beginning of our century because of the excavations by Sir Arthur Evans. It was like unearthing from the nebulae of the past, a new mythical world, unknown until then but very ravishing. The archaeological scientific research on the Minoan civilisation that was done during the continuous excavations by Greek and non-Greek scientists did not deprive the subject of its interest, but it became much more interesting. Of course, it is not easy to visualise the daily life in Minoan Crete; this happens not only because it has to be based on artefacts, which are contradictory testifiers, but also because the minoan civilisation, like every human activity, was not something static and fixed. Since 2600 BC, when the Neolithic civilisation ends, until 1400 BC, i.e. 1200 years, there had lived many generations of the human race and various things happened, in the island and overseas, which affected their life.Since 2000 BC and until 1700 BC the island reaches its greater prosperity. The “dynasties” are now of no importance and the local princes become powerful kings.

In c.1900 BC the first luxurious palaces are being built in Knossos, Phaistos and Malia. The three kings are almost equal and there is no enmity among them. In c.1643 BC, a disastrous earthquake ruins the palaces. After that earthquake, new palaces are built, which are larger and nicer. Minos, king of Knossos, seems to have the entire principality of the island during this period. In addition, in this period, the Cretans colonise peacefully the islands of the Aegean Sea and the coastline of Asia Minor.

The Cretans were sailors, and they had intercourse with all the other nations of the Mediterranean. In the Greek mainland, which was inhabited by the Achaians, the Cretan influence was obvious in art and fashion during the 17th century. On the other hand, the Achaians, who are powerful in the Greek mainland, become powerful in the sea as well. Hence since 1450 BC they dominate Crete.

Cookers, weaving weights, agricultural and carpentry tools, unearthed from agricultural regions, oil mills and wine presses, are the artefacts on which we are based to visualise the daily life of the peasants. We can imagine their small settlements, surrounded by fruitful trees. We can almost see men who work on agriculture, pastoralism, hunting, and apiculture, and women with their household duties, such as wheat milling, weaving, sewing, and embroidery of the clothing. Based on the burnt to ashes products and the minoan terminology of the plants, we can assume that Minoans used to cultivate their land and grow cereals, legumes and plenty of vegetables in their orchards. In addition, the greatest part of their production is wine, olive oil, and wheat.

These products became known to the other habitants of the Aegean islands by the Greeks. According to the ancient tradition, the Minoan Cretans were those who taught to the rest of Greece, the systematic cultivation of the olive tree, the vineyard and the wheat. Stafylos (the Grape man) was Cretan and he was the son of Dionysos and the Cretan princess Ariadne. He run away to Pepartho – nowadays Skopelos – and he is the ancestor of Spermo, Oino, and Elais. In Samothrace, recently there were found tables inscribed with Cretan hieroglyphics. Similar tables had been found in Knossos and they are talking about the importing of vineyards. The Minoan Cretans were not just good farmers. They also study the healing features of the plants. A kind of popular medicine is being developed. It is based on the experience they have and thus they are able to distinguish which plants can be used in pharmacy. Seals with Cretan hieroglyphics on them, which were found in Zakros, refer to types of drugs, such as strychnine on the seal with the famous deer-head man. The aromatic plants and the aromatic seeds are now very popular and they become merchandised products. Also, the farmers have flocks of oxen, sheep, pigs, and goats.Oxen are very useful for transports and agriculture. The Minoans have no horse until the Postminoan period (1600 BC), when it is imported for the first time. They have asses, which are also used for transport among the urban centres. In these centres, there are summoned agricultural products and timber. Oaks, firs, and cypresses are used for shipbuilding.

Of course, the Minoan civilisation was not just a civilisation of farmers. Apart from the population that dwells the countryside, there is the population of the cities. These cities are not away from the coastline. The coastline of Crete, and especially the northeaster, had never been so densely inhabited. The bigger cities have town centres and all the roads end in these centres. The dominant parts of the cities are the palaces (Phaistos, Knossos, Malia, and Zakros). Their courts, their gardens, the reception halls, the temples, the private suites of the royal family, the warehouses, their height, the buildings with many floors and balconies, comprise a labyrinthine complex of buildings. In addition, the royal courts of the princes that are around the palaces are very luxurious as well. Those royal courts seem to belong to military or administrative officers of the upper class or to priests. An example is the royal court of Archanes, which is near Knossos. These courts have well done interiors with walls covered with shiny plaster or beautiful frescos, with silken floors, well done floors, hydraulic installations, and baths. All these testify the existence of an elegant society that lives a life of high quality. This society builds comfortable houses with tasteful interiors. However, these courts have also some smaller rooms and not too far from them are some poor settlements as well.

The city of Gournia gives us a very characteristic image for the special construction of a Minoan city. It has small workshops, which are well preserved, and the house of the ruler is on the top of the hill where the city is built. We will not be able to understand the social organisation of the Minoan world unless we understand the centralised character of the Minoan economy, which is based on the capital. The palace is the central point for the life of the whole city. The king has divine power. He is the great priest, the great judge, and the great general. He is surrounded by priests and officers. In the private apartments, the scriveners record on tables the slaves, the armour, the flocks and the incoming of the palace.

The guards are awake and patrol. The state wealth and the navy belong to the king. The princes of the provinces are representatives of him and they have to live an analogous life. Wealth and luxury give to them the social image that their status necessitates. The king is also the great diplomat who accepts in his court the representatives of foreign states. Apart from him, the princes of Palaiokastro, Pseira and Mochlos accept quite often the official visitors from East, Syria, or Cyprus. The palace also does commutation of products. The Egyptian texts are talking about the commutation between the Pharaohs and Babylon, Cyprus and Crete. The “Ceftiou” (Cretans) take from the Pharaoh gold, ivory, luxurious textiles, perfumes, slaves from Nouvia and playful monkeys for the royal gardens of Minos. In return, they give to the Pharaoh the beautiful products of their metalworking. Apart from the royal commerce, there are some merchants who trade in small scale. It is doubtful whether there was large-scale commerce during the Minoan years by non-royal merchants.

There in no “demos” in the Minoan world and the existence of slavery is doubtful. A group of artisans is depended on the palace or the royal courts of the princes. There, they have their workshops and they produce beautiful pieces of pottery, sculpture, goldsmithery, or seal making for the king or the prince. Of course, we can not exclude the possibility of the existence of an independent class of artisans, organised in craft guilds, who work in the cities.

Royal or not, these artisans always create masterpieces and it is obvious that their creative and reproductive mind has no limits. The freedom that the Minoan artisan enjoys is of no doubt. This explains the variety of forms and the indignation for new expressional ways. This is characteristic for the development of the Minoan pottery and sculpture and the existence of great local workshops all over the island.

However, journeys, work, and the function of the state mechanism are not the most important things in life of those people. Their Mediterranean nature seeks social activities.

They love celebrations, religion festivals, dancing and singing. Homer says that the Cretans are great and skilful dancers. Dancing is the way that those agile men and brunette women express and enjoy themselves. We can imagine them living in their elegant and simple furniture houses, which are cool during the summer and warm during the winter. They have mobile braziers and lamps in the rooms that are not naturally illuminated. Their perfect hydraulic system, which is spread all over the house, shows how important was hygiene for the Minoans. In addition, physical exercise very important for them because it gives them good physical condition and charm and elegance. They drive chariots, they take part in acrobatics with bulls, and they participate in all festivals, ritual procedures, and symposia. In contrast to the rest of Greece where woman always indoors, Minoan women participate in every social activity. The gentleness of the Minoan ladies seats them in the first seats in public meetings. They arrive in litters, carried by slaves. They are perfumed, elegantly dressed. In frescos, we see women being talkative and sociable, while they are waiting for the opening of the festivals. Also, the rest of the day, they are sitting in the palace, sewing, or playing the minoan board game called “zatrikio”. Their intercourse with the opposite sex tones up their smartness. We know Minoan fashion from the female idols that have been found. The main characteristic of Minoan fashion is the emphasis on femininity and the curves of the female body. The dresses are rich, colourful, with a lot of drapery and they have wide belts that are stretched round the waste.

The corset is very tight leaving the breast bare, and has short sleeves and long necks. They often wear hats and their hair are elaborately combed and adorned with jewellery. Whatever their economical status, Minoan women have collections of jewellery in wide range. At home, they usually walk on bear foot, wearing bracelets around their ankles. Of course, sometimes they wear shoes too. They also use lipsticks, make up, they colour their nails and maybe their hair too. Men too, take care of themselves. They have long hair but they are always beardless and well shaven. Although, their clothing is very simple, they wear many pieces of jewellery. However, their appearance is very masculine. Of course, their masculine appearance is the result of their daily exercising. Running, wrestling, and playing with the bull are their favourite activities. In addition, they are skilful swimmers and hunters.

Political, social and economical life are not the only sectors with which the Minoan world has to do. All these sectors of life are deeply influenced by religion. Every intellectual and artistic activity is inspired by the Great Minoan Goddess. She rules not only the cosmos but also the daily human life. She is the Great Mother Goddess and she has many abilities. She is the “tamer of the beasts”, the “Britomartis” that means the sweet virgin, goddess of the virgins and the births, peaceful and matron of war. She is the Earth Goddess, and the Sea and Heavens Goddess. She causes the earthquakes and makes trees, plants and flowers bloom and have fruits. She owns the stars, she rules the waves, she protects the ships. There are no other gods.

Often, she is accompanied by the young god of flora and other demonic creatures. Cretan people believe that flora itself is the carnation of the Young God or the Holy Infant. Following the annual circle of nature, the vegetation of trees and plants, and then their wilting, the Minoans made birth, death, and the rebirth of the Young God, part of their religion. This god is called “Belchanos” (god of beasts) or “Yakinthos” (weak as child). In his various minoan images, he is presented as partner of the Mother Goddess or as her child. However, sometimes the Minoans used to worship instead of the Young God, a Young Goddess who was dying and resurrecting each year. This young goddess was Ariadne, daughter of king Minos. It is obvious that Minoan religion was monotheistic, combined with ancient cults of stone worship. The goddess is the centre of this religion and she is represented with many symbols: double axes, tridents, stars, thunders, wheat, etc.

The Minoans used to worship the Great Goddess in caverns, in darkness where stalactites make a mystic atmosphere. Also, they worship her in small dark rooms which are something like domestic altars, or on mountain tops where they burn purgatorial fires and through prays, magic ritual procedures and pleads, they try to communicate with the Goddess. Other rituals seem to take place in open areas, the courts of the palaces and the sacred hills. These procedures are lead by the King, officers, priests and musicians who accompany the priestesses when they dance in a rhythmic and ecstatic way. The crowd that participates gives to rituals a public character.

The top-ranking priestess is the queen, who appears in a specific part of the ritual and symbolises the coming of the goddess. If someone will add to these rituals, the sacrifices with animals, the libations and the acrobatics with the bull, he could see that Minoan religion combines mysticism with publicity.

The religious hymns are the only thing that we do not know. On Minoan literature, we can make only assumptions. A nation with such warmth and artistic activity should have sung in its language, which is Greek, about its daily life, but also to its divinity. In addition, our knowledge about the Minoan theory on death is very limited. They respect their dead; they bury them in vaulted tombs, in earthenware jars or in sarcophaguses. They put with the corpse, his signets, and his weapons, vessels and censers. However, we do not know the purpose of this type of engraving. What happens to the soul and what is the nature of the human body is very doubtful. On these matters, even the ancient Greeks expressed many different theories. Similar might be the minoan opinion since, according to the hieroglyphics and Linear A, their writing, they were Greek as well. Certainly, the Minoan Greeks do not believe in metaphysics, like other oriental cultures of the same period, nor they try to preserve whatever has to do with the dead, on the honour of him, as it happens in Egypt. They used to believe that each man’s life follows the fate, according to the text of the pin from Mavro Spilio of Knossos. Living in the Mediterranean environment and climate, which is so beautiful, they wanted to live every moment of their life. Of course, they knew that one day they will die but they were dealing death creating for the eternity. The only thing that they did not know was when chaos would come. The Great Goddess did not save them from disaster. In 1450, an earthquake and a great wave that the earthquake caused, at the upheaval of the Thera volcano, obliterated their life. They run away to the mountains to save their lives, leaving whatever they possessed. After the earthquake, the Minoans met their second disaster, the Achaian dominion in their country. Some of them immigrated to other lands, and some others inhabited isolated areas. All these people could not certainly imagine that after thousands of years, their life would be the object of excavations and archaeological research.

The omphalic field of Knossos as global geodetic centre

2011-04-16T06:43:00.000-07:00

During the Minoan years in Crete, almost every city and every palace had its own cavern of worship, high atop some near mountain, which was found at a distance of maximum one hour. If some cavern of worship was significant and used for the needs people of more than one city, then the structure of these cities was adjusted according to the position of the worship cavern. Usually the cities were situated eastern of the sacred cavern, while the inner sanctum of the temples found in the city was orientated towards the sacred cavern at the west and the temple entrance was often from the east. In these caverns, which of course were not always natural ones, the ceremonies were performed by persons with exceptional encyclopaedic education derived from scriptures, unique at their kind, because they were describing almost everything existing or happening during this or previous eras of many centuries. Everything they knew was owed to their Cretan sea domination by that time, throughout the nowadays known world, and to the participation of mercenary Cretan warriors in all the armies of the era.

The knowledge they possessed became from early an object of trade, because of their unique importance and were supplied to the great, pythian, minoan era oracles, especially after those that have flourished in the name of the Judge Minos, as a divinity. Later on again, this means of spreading knowledge is continued and promoted by the orphics having as a Crete, and especially Phaistos, as the basis and is expanded worldwide.

This was easy, because ever since many centuries ago many nations were speaking the Cretan language (Hellenic) and were writing in Linear A', with minimal alterations, depending on the intellectual education of each nation. Most of them were under the influence of Cretan settlers, who with the passing of the millennia had created their own civilizations not any more dependant on the metropolis. The Minoan civilization of that era is far from the Mycenaean and every other civilization to the extent that the technology of a bicycle is exceeded by the technology spaceships or the technology of nuclear weapons from the unknown to the western world Tesla superweapon technology.

«If we could view a Cretan palace of approximately 1500 B.C. with almost all its decorations, it would cause us surprise, if not astonishment», Hood claims. (Here Hood, a worthy excavationist, perhaps the only English that passed from the island at the last millennium with clearly scientific and not trading interests as other descendants of Elgin and Evans, refers according to the until now predominant view of events chronology, which does not anymore correspond to the reality about 'prehistoric' occurrences). At the Ugarit poems , the god of handicraft has his throne in Kaphtor(=Crete), Sinclair Hood notes.

«Here -says Nikos Kazantzakis at his Reference to Graeco - the soul of Greece performed its fatal mission: it brought the god at the human climax. The enormous, static Egyptian or assyrian statues became here, in Crete, small and charming. The body moved, the mouth smiled, the face and height of the god took the face and height of the human».

We will now cope with the previous mentioned more analytically. Inevitably, we shall begin from Minos, the omnipotent dominator and Sea Ruler. We cannot refrain from calling him omnipotent, him who conquered and civilized the entire planet Earth, leaving at each of his missions people that created colonies..from Japan to the American continent, as it is seen from the living and soulless relics. People that still maintain customs and traditions from Crete, with their dialect as well coming from the mixture of language spoken per location with the Minoan one (Hellenic Cretan dialect), (when we are referring to Minos we do not mean a specific person, but a title of a king-priest. Even though the indications lead to the conclusion that the most famous of all, who offered prestige to this title, according to the writings of the Papyrus-Larus-Britannica encyclopaedia, was Minos B'). During the last two decades many foreign historians and researches clearly found Greek words at the languages of Inca, Aztecs in the Southern and Central American, as well as the Pacific Ocean, Indonesia, New Guinea, Polynesia, Melanesia and Australia. Moreover from India and China to Japan not only greek words do exist, but also very ancient Greek naming of locations such as in Chine, whose southern region is called Yunan = Ionia etc.

Furthermore even to the most, if not all, languages of the African continent they discover clearly Hellenic words equally ancient and modern. The resemblance between words of the Hawaii language and corresponding ones from ancient Greek is remarkable. In the Hawaii language «aeto» means aetos = eagle, «nou-nou» = nous(thought), «manao» = matheno (ancient Greek: «manthano» = learn), «mele» = song (ancient Greek.: «melos» ), «laoui» = laos(people), «iki» = arrive (ancient Greek.: «ikano» ), noko = live, inhabit (ancient Greek.: «naeo» ). At the Canarian islands, there are the words «alio» for Helios=Sun and «sel» for Selene=Moon. The Aztecs use the word «Teo» in their compound words for «God» (ancient Greek.: «melos») which is met in many locations. The most curious coincidence is at the word «teokali» that means «the house of God» and is very similar to the ancient Greek «Theou kalias» which means «the altar of God». Pecular also is the Mayan phrase «Konex Omon Panex», that sounds the same way with the phrase «Konx Om Panx», spoken by the ancient Greeks during the Eleusian Rites whose ceremonial details come from Crete. The same greek phrase is also used by the Brahmans in their religious ceremonies, under the form «Kansa Om Pansa». (We have coped with the translation of «Konx Om Panx» and its etymological analysis at an article about the Minoan Worshipper in Patrida newspaper, Heraklion of Crete.

The Mayan scripture is literally the ancient Cretan scripture, Linear A, that arrived there from this Greek island. The presence of Hellenism is visible in Maya. The art of painting, sculpture, textiles process, all of them Hellenic and in specific Minoan and Mycenaean. The temples with the monolithic pillars, weighting 25 tones, were not build of course in the jungle by inhabitant farmers, because they demanded architects, geometrical knowledge and definitely high technology. They moreover constructed observatories and stadiums alike the Greek ones. The Greek Minoans governed Maya and the Spanish conquistadors narrated that the grand imperial family of Peru, which possessed all the high rankings, spoke a special language, incomprehensible to the public and to the translators. Was this language ancient Cretan, that is ancient Greek?. We know from our articles in «Patrida» at the issues of 4 and 5/2/97, in the January 1997 issue of «Daulos» magazine, and the January-March 1998 issue of the magazine «Archaelogi and Arts» (article about the ornamental pin of the Cretan Agios Nicolaos Museum), that Greek is not only the language of Linear B, but of Linear A also, even more is the language of phonetic values at the Cretan 'hieroglyphs' which were used by the priests until the first millennium B.C.

Let us note that from all the Precolombian people only the Mayans «created» a scripture system and their language differs entirely from the rest ones of Central America and Mexico. We also meet many words of the ancient Greek Cretan dialect in the extremely ancient Indian one. Noteworthy is i.e. the Cretan type of the referring pronoun 'ostis', written 'otini' in the dative case, with ending found in the ancient indian, -kasmin. (enyclopaedia Papyrus-Larus-Britannica). Many words of the ancient Incas are similar to the ancient Greek since they have Minoan origin. Let it also be noted that the French researcher Pierre Honore, has discovered inscriptions with the Cretan Linear List of Syllables at the shores of Amazon, pictures of which have been also been published by researcher Mertz. A jar of Crete origin, identical of which was discovered in Knossos, was found in Bimini. Cretan copper made Doubleaxes were discovered in Wisconsin and Ohaio of U.S.A. Similar objects have been found in England as well.

The cultural invasion of the Cretans, in the various areas of the northern (especially) hemisphere, commenced before the 4th millennium B.C., creating several afterwards great civilizations like the Egyptian and the great civilizations of south America. Each of the different enormous cities built around the globe by our ancestors, the Minoans (before the existence of any form of civilization in Egypt), was a geodetic landmark of a colossal system of annotation for each geographical longitude, with the most ancient being the centre of the Omphalic Field of Knossos, the grand disaster of which took place in the second half of the 16th century B.C. Remnants of ashes from Santorini volcano were recently found in Greenland, dating back to 1623 B.C. and showing, with a deviation of approximately 20 years, the year of destruction of the Minoan civilization. The explosion of the Santorini volcano was such, that almost reached the entire planet at the verge of a catastrophe.

In order to realise the extent of the disaster, we shall attempt a comparison of this eruption with the comparatively far smaller one of the Krakatao volcano, which is situated at Sounda pass, between Java and Sumatra, that occurred in the 26th of August 1883. The University of Athens professor, M.D. Dermitzakis, in an article of his in 'Iconographimeni Historia' by Papyrus Press, issue 318, writes: "At the 26th of August strong explosions were heard at a distance of 160kms and thick dark clouds were thrown at a height of 27kms. Across the length of Java and Sumatra shores darkness fell, since the volcanic clouds covered the sun. This darkness lasted two and half days. Cataclysmic rainfall of volcanic ashes was added to the perturbulence. At the 27th of August, Krakatao reached at its maximum explosive level. The noises of a series of explosions were heard up to Australia, at a distance of 4840 kms. At the same time, volcanic lava was ejected many kilometres high in the sky. The most thin-grained particles, with the assistance of the stratosphere winds, surrounded the earth and required almost two years in order to settle down. It was calculated that 6-8 cubic kilometres of shredded stones were ejected to the air during the paroxysms, which shaped Krakatao into a cone, with a release of energy equal to the one of the strongest hydrogen bomb. Naturally, the impact of its eruption was the creation of a tsunami, which reached the height of 38m. from top to bottom, while it stroke the Java and Sumatra shores sweeping to death 36.000 people. The tsunami strength could be estimated because it carried a large ship 2.5 kms in the inland and threw it there 10 meters above sea level. Rocks weighting 50 tones were carried even further). As it is seen in the «house of the fallen rocks» of Knossos, strong thrusting powers literally caused the explosion of gigantic rocks that no human force would be possible to even move, unless manipulating the nowadays mechanical means. This catastrophe comprised a more general geological phenomenon, which was also observed at Troy, in the western Asia Minor and in the central Palestine, as the excavations have also showed.

For the same event, Nicolaos Platon, in his book «Zakros The new Minoan palace» 1974 editon, (by the Archaeological Company of Greece), writes in pages 264 and 266 and onwards, with the subtitle «The parallel of Krakatao»:

« Information about the destructive consequences that the great Thera eruption may have caused was compiled for the study of the Krakatao volcano explosion during the year 1883, the only analogous case for which we have precise details. The volcanic island of Krakatao was transformed into characteristic caldera through consecutive eruptions. After a 200-year period of idleness, the volcano erupted suddenly in August 1993, after a smaller prodromic eruption in May. For two days the volcano ejected magma, ash, steams and gases. Strong noises from crashing waves and fire and air vibrations escorted the eruption. The ash and gases, awfully smelling due to the brimstone included to the magma, covered to an enormous portion the neighbouring islands Java and Sumatra, while the sky there was entirely darkened for two entire months. The soil was covered by a dust layer of 0.30 m. depth. A small quantity in this layer was coming from shredded rocks of the island, whose 2/3, of an area 28 square kms, sank in the sea, collapsing inside the magma-emptied underground hall. A volcanic wave of 35 m. was created by the sinking, which literally swept the shores of the great islands Java and Sumatra, destroying 295 settlements and causing the drowning of 36000 people. The results were furthermore becoming observable at a wide area of the globe. The tsunami was sensed in every ocean, and the noises by the vibrations were estimated to have been heard through the 1/3 of the planet's total area. Damages were inflicted to households at an area of 800 square kms around Krakatao. Geostrophic winds carried the thin dust throughout the seas.

If one were to compare these phenomena with the ones of the Thera eruption, he would be able to extract with relative safety the conclusion that the latter owed to have been of multiple intensity, certainly no less than four times. At Thera, an area of 83 square kms sank, the magma spitting cones were three and the surface-covering layer reached a depths of more than 30 m. The volcanic wave produced by a far greater water displacement was incomparatively greater and was certainly transmitted with maximum speed, since this increases in relation to the depth of the water volumes on which it moves, a depth which reaches 1500 m. between Thera and Crete. The wave height is estimated to have reached 70-100 m. and its speed exceeded 350 kms per hour, thus arriving at the shores of Crete within the first 20 minutes, which it literally swept over. Observations that took place in the neighbouring island of Thera, Anaphi, examined as possible, according to the reassurements of geologist G. Marinos, that a dust layer 5 m. thick was cast in the bottom of a valley at a height of 250 m. above the sea. Other scientists supported that this layer was placed there during another, far older eruption. The tsunami definately reached until the shores of Syria, Tynesia, the Nile Delta and Palestine, about three hours after the eruption. In Jaffan, ancient Ioppis (currently comprising a section of Tel Aviv), a dust layer was discovered 5 m. above sea surface. The massive roars were heard far beyond Scandinavia, central Africa and mid-Atlantic Ocean. Strong earthquakes must have preceded as well as followed the eruption, provoked by the dislocation of the lava crust and as a result of the terrible sinking. Generally the power of the eruption was approximated as equal to the one that hundreds of hydrogen bombs would provoke. One can therefore perceive the consequences it would have to the relatively small-distance situated Minoan centres ».

The consecutive Thera volcano eruptions have caused such a confusion to the attempts for chronological definition of the great disaster, that even today they assume it has occurred in 1450 B.C. Moreover it still has not been defined whether the destruction of Crete happened because of the direct volcanic activity or the results of the falling dust and earthquakes, that were also escorted by great fires. Since however neither human victims of the final disaster or of the previous were discovered, it seems that the people found time to escape, since they managed to hide numerous treasures under the house floors of Knossos, with the hope to seek for them in the future. The view that because in the tomb depictions of Egyptian officers under the service of King Tuthmosis III (1481-1447 B.C.) , Kefti (Cretans) have been presented carrying pottery similar to the Zakros findings, the century of the palace destruction is proven, is not valid. The reason is that we should not exclude the case that the Minoans had created a city worthy of their civilization in Middle East and had continued their exchanges with various people same as before. I have indications for this case, that such a city with a flourishing port was Haifa under the name Ako or Akho, which I believe was also the Minoan city of Knossos. Knossos was called by the name we know her today by Mycenaeans. The graveyard of this city was at Aharnes according to the etymological analysis of the word (Akh-arnes->Aharnes->Arhanes=Hades of Ako=graveyard of Ako). I read the name of the Minoan «Knossos» at a coin of the «historic» times, which carries the design of the Labyrinth, on the left it as we see it the letter A, on the right R and under the design the word Knosion. Below the letters A and R, there are two hieroglyphs which, when read from right to left (meaning from R to A), they give us the word Ako. It appears that during historic times, a coin of the «prehistoric times» was copied, on which the name of the Mycenaean Knossos (preserved until today) was additionally written using the Greek alphabet. I should also add that Knossos = destroyed Ako, in the Mycenaean dialect. (Initially we have a-ko-no-so = a-ko no-so = Ako nosos(meaning illness, disaster) = Ako destroyed)

The Minoan era cities conveyed geodetic and astronomical interdependence with Knossos being the global point of reference along with Phaestus and Pafos of Cyprus at the 35th parallel, while the number of the rhodakes (roses) leaves and the various star names are characteristic of each geographical parallel. Thus, from the rhodakes drawing we can discern if i.e. a jar is related with Crete or Mycenae, located in the 38th parallel. The cities shape isosceles triangles with each other. The triangle Knossos-Sparta-Dodoni is isosceles, same as the triangles Olympia-Dephi-Athens, Sparta-Athens-Delos, Sparta-Dodoni-Athens, Deplhi-Argos-Athens and others.

The orientation of the temples was performed on the basis of some focal centers (omphali) such as i.e. Delphi, Delos, Sardes, the temple of Ammon Zeus in the Siva (Siua) oasis of Egypt which Pharaoh Amasis had built in 520 B.C. in the name of sun Ammon, while there also existed an oracle which advised Alexander the Great telling him that he was the one to dominate over Egypt. The Egyptian dynasties had abolished this system, to which Pharaoh Akhenaton tried to restore unsuccessfully. Later on, Menealos, keeper of the geodetic knowledge from his ancestor Thyestis, renewed this extremely ancient system by building Canopos almost above the ruins of the predynastic capital Behntet, which geodetically harmonized with a series of omphali of the northern hemisphere.

We admired the geodetic knowledge of the Minoans in combination with the religious conscience, while when researching we observed the following:

1) The ophalic field of Knossos which as we mentioned was a global center of geodetic refernece, is located at the weight center, meaning the intersection point of the isosceles triangle mid-verticals, whose projection has as its edges the great caverns of worship (Arkalohori-Psyhrou-Skoteinou), whose centre is situated near the Castelian plain airport, at the Heraklion of Crete, and specifically slightly northeast of Euaggelismos village. The geographic centers were also characterised as omphali in ancenstral times. After all, the correct naming is Omphalic pedon=pedion=field=midland according to N. Stavrakis. Spratt also places this field in the Castelian plain at the Pediada county (I do not know whether this location of Spratt is supported geographically), and places Thenes at the position of today's village Sampas of the same county, northwest of Castelion. The river Crateros has its source at the Castelian plain, known as Amnisos or Triton in ancient times. According to Diodoros of Sicily, in this area of the Triton sources, Athena was born by Zeus, and due to this fact was called Tritogeneia (born of - at Triton). "They also narrate in lores Athena to have been born in Crete at the sources of Triton river, and thus named Tritogeneia. There is even up to now around these sources a holy sanctum of this Goddess, on the place where her bith they narrate in lores to have taken place". The word Athena itself, in the Cretan dialect Atana (Tan was the name of Zeus in Crete) explains etymologically the above. The claim by Pape that Thenes are in Kanni Castelli, and therefore the Ophalic field mentioned by Callimachus in his hymn to Zeus is at the valley between Knossos and this village, is incorrect. since it is not based on anything. When the legend of Callimachus says that the Cydonias called Omphalic the place were the navel of baby Zeus fell, implies the geodetic ompalus of the geodetic ompalic field of Knossos.

2) The point where the ancient city of Malia is situated creates an isosceles triangle with the points found in the sacred caverns of Psychros and Skoteinos, with Malia on the top. This means we have the distances: cavern Skoteinou-cavern Arkalohoriou=cavern Arkalohoriou-cavern Psyhrou, Psyhrou-Malia=Malia-Skoteinou.

3) The distance Knossos-Arkalohoriou=cavern Skoteinou-cavern Arkalohoriou.

4) Circular perimeter with the range the distance Arkalohoriou-Psyhrou, and with center Arkalohoriou passing through Skoteinou and Knossos.

Euimeros mentions that, the farmost ancient Greek Minoan Cretes, led by Zeus, had created settlements in Arabia, Persia, Indian Ocean islands, Paghaia island, Mesopotamia, where after many years they were named Sumerians, until the Black Sea, where they appeared and settled as Halyves. Philhellenes Indians of Calcuta claim: «We believe we came from Crete far before Alexander (at least some of us). Cretan seals have been discovered in our area. The Yiang port was a very ancient one and the history of the real Argonauts must be hidden there» («Oikonomikos Taxydromos Ταχυδρόμος», 6-10-94). Should perhaps this so-called «Indoeuropean language» or even some «ancient mediterranean» be called Graecocretominoan instead?; Archaeologist S.K.Chattergi in the chapter of his famous book «History and civilization of the Indian people» not only admits the great immigration from the Aegean islands with Crete as their center, but also insists in the origins of the indian people from the «prehellenes» of the Aegean. An Indian archaeologist, while seeking old buddhist temples in Pakistan (1922), discovered six sealstones, one after another, bearing a carved depiction of perfect art. Without being able to decipher them, he referred to the orientalist archaeologist Sir John Marshal, to whom he surrendered his findings. During 1925 it became known that some relationship between these sealstones and the pictorial depictions on the Disk of Phaestus should exist. In a recent announcement made by the professor of theoretic physics of the Yokohama Unversity, Yoshiro Takano, in which he mentions the similarity of Militos to its metropolis Milato of Crete, similarity topographic, poleodomic, architectural and above all geographical, he does not leave any doubt that the settlers of Militos brought to their new country the geographical knowledge of their metropolitan files. The Minoan colonizing activity, that is already defined in the mid of the 2nd millennium B.C., was intensified after the great eruption of Thera volcano. The immigrants-colonists carried to their new homes whatever precious they could save. The celestial sphere found under the possession of Thales from Militos as well as the knowledge of this wise man, to whom the book «Nautical Astrology» is attributed, must have had Minoan Crete as their origin. The Minoan geography is easily discerned in the geodetical and topographical convictions of the Minoan constructors and colonists.. The writer of the «Ships Catalogue» in rhapsody B of The Iliad mentions that the Minoans that escorted the Idomeneus fleet in the campaign against Troy were coming from a hundred states. It would not be a surprise if it were confirmed by the archaeological excavations that these were allocated according to the geometric triangularity which, as we mentioned, exists in the sacred caverns. The Omphalus oracle, in the Ophalic Pedon (Pedion=Field), at Castelion of Pediada, at a specific geographical longitude, so as to comprise a calculation key for the geographic distances between Northern and Southern hemisphere, is a fact that signifies the advancement the Minoans had achieved in this area. Whatismore the presence of Minoan priests («Cretans from Minoan Knossos», «Orgiones») in the omphalus of the world, in Delphi, as it is mentioned at the «Homeric Hymn to Apollo» constitutes an additional testimony implying the relationship of these two areas in terms of sacred geography. The navigation of the Minoans in the Atlantic was definitely contacted on the basis of some earthen and astronomical coordinations. This passage from nautical astrology to the systems of geographical coordinations was complex, since those who founded the geographical longitudes and latitudes (in the ancestral geodetic form) were required to gather the experience of countless travels and the knowledge of basic sciences of their era.

It is a fact that the roots of geography and geodesy begin from the Minoan area and from whichever legacy of the ancient Cretan sailors and explorers.

Antonis Thomas Vasilakis

Researcher of Prehistoric Scriptures

Vlychia - Knossos

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Vasilakis Antonis of Thomas: <>
Vasilakis Antonis of Thomas: <>.

Prometheus and Pandora

2011-04-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

The creation of the world is a problem naturally fitted to excite the liveliest interest of man, its inhabitant. The ancient pagans, not having the information on the subject which we derive from the pages of Scripture, had their own way of telling the story, which is as follows:

Before earth and sea and heaven were created, all things wore one aspect, to which we give the name of Chaos—a confused and shapeless mass, nothing but dead weight, in which, however, slumbered the seeds of things. Earth, sea, and air were all mixed up together; so the earth was not solid, the sea was not fluid, and the air was not transparent. God and Nature at last interposed, and put an end to this discord, separating earth from sea, and heaven from both. The fiery part, being the lightest, sprang up, and formed the skies; the air was next in weight and place. The earth, being heavier, sank below; and the water took the lowest place, and buoyed up the earth.

Here some god—it is not known which—gave his good offices in arranging and disposing the earth. He appointed rivers and bays their places, raised mountains, scooped out valleys, distributed woods, fountains, fertile fields, and stony plains. The air being cleared, the stars began to appear, fishes took possession of the sea, birds of the air, and four-footed beasts of the land.

But a nobler animal was wanted, and Man was made. It is not known whether the creator made him of divine materials, or whether in the earth, so lately separated from heaven, there lurked still some heavenly seeds. Prometheus took some of this earth, and kneading it up with water, made man in the image of the gods. He gave him an upright stature, so that while all other animals turn their faces downward, and look to the earth, he raises his to heaven, and gazes on the stars.

Prometheus was one of the Titans, a gigantic race, who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. To him and his brother Epimetheus was committed the office of making man, and providing him and all other animals with the faculties necessary for their preservation. Epimetheus undertook to do this, and Prometheus was to overlook his work, when it was done. Epimetheus accordingly proceeded to bestow upon the different animals the various gifts of courage, strength, swiftness, sagacity; wings to one, claws to another, a shelly covering to a third, etc. But when man came to be provided for, who was to be superior to all other animals, Epimetheus had been so prodigal of his resources that he had nothing left to bestow upon him. In his perplexity he resorted to his brother Prometheus, who, with the aid of Minerva, went up to heaven, and lighted his torch at the chariot of the sun, and brought down fire to man. With this gift man was more than a match for all other animals. It enabled him to make weapons wherewith to subdue them; tools with which to cultivate the earth; to warm his dwelling, so as to be comparatively independent of climate; and finally to introduce the arts and to coin money, the means of trade and commerce.

Woman was not yet made. The story (absurd enough!) is that Jupiter made her, and sent her to Prometheus and his brother, to punish them for their presumption in stealing fire from heaven; and man, for accepting the gift. The first woman was named Pandora. She was made in heaven, every god contributing something to perfect her. Venus gave her beauty, Mercury persuasion, Apollo music, etc. Thus equipped, she was conveyed to earth, and presented to Epimetheus, who gladly accepted her, though cautioned by his brother to beware of Jupiter and his gifts. Epimetheus had in his house a jar, in which were kept certain noxious articles, for which, in fitting man for his new abode, he had had no occasion. Pandora was seized with an eager curiosity to know what this jar contained; and one day she slipped off the cover and looked in. Forthwith there escaped a multitude of plagues for hapless man,—such as gout, rheumatism, and colic for his body, and envy, spite, and revenge for his mind,—and scattered themselves far and wide. Pandora hastened to replace the lid! but, alas! the whole contents of the jar had escaped, one thing only excepted, which lay at the bottom, and that was hope. So we see at this day, whatever evils are abroad, hope never entirely leaves us; and while we have that, no amount of other ills can make us completely wretched.

Another story is that Pandora was sent in good faith, by Jupiter, to bless man; that she was furnished with a box, containing her marriage presents, into which every god had put some blessing. She opened the box incautiously, and the blessings all escaped, hope only excepted. This story seems more probable than the former; for how could hope, so precious a jewel as it is, have been kept in a jar full of all manner of evils, as in the former statement?

The world being thus furnished with inhabitants, the first age was an age of innocence and happiness, called the Golden Age. Truth and right prevailed, though not enforced by law, nor was there any magistrate to threaten or punish. The forest had not yet been robbed of its trees to furnish timbers for vessels, nor had men built fortifications round their towns. There were no such things as swords, spears, or helmets. The earth brought forth all things necessary for man, without his labor in ploughing or sowing. Perpetual spring reigned, flowers sprang up without seed, the rivers flowed with milk and wine, and yellow honey distilled from the oaks.

Then succeeded the Silver Age, inferior to the golden, but better than that of brass. Jupiter shortened the spring, and divided the year into seasons. Then, first, men had to endure the extremes of heat and cold, and houses became necessary. Caves were the first dwellings, and leafy coverts of the woods, and huts woven of twigs. Crops would no longer grow without planting. The farmer was obliged to sow the seed and the toiling ox to draw the plough.

Next came the Brazen Age, more savage of temper, and readier to the strife of arms, yet not altogether wicked. The hardest and worst was the Iron Age. Crime burst in like a flood; modesty, truth, and honor fled. In their places came fraud and cunning, violence, and the wicked love of gain. Then seamen spread sails to the wind, and the trees were torn from the mountains to serve for keels to ships, and vex the face of ocean. The earth, which till now had been cultivated in common, began to be divided off into possessions. Men were not satisfied with what the surface produced, but must dig into its bowels, and draw forth from thence the ores of metals. Mischievous iron, and more mischievous gold, were produced. War sprang up, using both as weapons; the guest was not safe in his friend’s house; and sons-in-law and fathers-in-law, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, could not trust one another. Sons wished their fathers dead, that they might come to the inheritance; family love lay prostrate. The earth was wet with slaughter, and the gods abandoned it, one by one, till Astræa 1 alone was left, and finally she also took her departure.

Jupiter, seeing this state of things, burned with anger. He summoned the gods to council. They obeyed the call, and took the road to the palace of heaven. The road, which any one may see in a clear night, stretches across the face of the sky, and is called the Milky Way. Along the road stand the palaces of the illustrious gods; the common people of the skies live apart, on either side. Jupiter addressed the assembly. He set forth the frightful condition of things on the earth, and closed by announcing his intention to destroy the whole of its inhabitants, and provide a new race, unlike the first, who would be more worthy of life, and much better worshippers of the gods. So saying he took a thunderbolt, and was about to launch it at the world, and destroy it by burning; but recollecting the danger that such a conflagration might set heaven itself on fire, he changed his plan, and resolved to drown it. The north wind, which scatters the clouds, was chained up; the south was sent out, and soon covered all the face of heaven with a cloak of pitchy darkness. The clouds, driven together, resound with a crash; torrents of rain fall; the crops are laid low; the year’s labor of the husbandman perishes in an hour. Jupiter, not satisfied with his own waters, calls on his brother Neptune to aid him with his. He lets loose the rivers, and pours them over the land. At the same time, he heaves the land with an earthquake, and brings in the reflux of the ocean over the shores. Flocks, herds, men, and houses are swept away, and temples, with their sacred enclosures, profaned. If any edifice remained standing, it was overwhelmed, and its turrets lay hid beneath the waves. Now all was sea, sea without shore. Here and there an individual remained on a projecting hilltop, and a few, in boats, pulled the oar where they had lately driven the plough. The fishes swim among the tree-tops; the anchor is let down into a garden. Where the graceful lambs played but now, unwieldy sea calves gambol. The wolf swims among the sheep, the yellow lions and tigers struggle in the water. The strength of the wild boar serves him not, nor his swiftness the stag. The birds fall with weary wing into the water, having found no land for a resting-place. Those living beings whom the water spared fell a prey to hunger.

Parnassus alone, of all the mountains, overtopped the waves; and there Deucalion, and his wife Pyrrha, of the race of Prometheus, found refuge—he a just man, and she a faithful worshipper of the gods. Jupiter, when he saw none left alive but this pair, and remembered their harmless lives and pious demeanor, ordered the north winds to drive away the clouds, and disclose the skies to earth, and earth to the skies. Neptune also directed Triton to blow on his shell, and sound a retreat to the waters. The waters obeyed, and the sea returned to its shores, and the rivers to their channels. Then Deucalion thus addressed Pyrrha: “O wife, only surviving woman, joined to me first by the ties of kindred and marriage, and now by a common danger, would that we possessed the power of our ancestor Prometheus, and could renew the race as he at first made it! But as we cannot, let us seek yonder temple, and inquire of the gods what remains for us to do.” They entered the temple, deformed as it was with slime, and approached the altar, where no fire burned. There they fell prostrate on the earth, and prayed the goddess to inform them how they might retrieve their miserable affairs. The oracle answered, “Depart from the temple with head veiled and garments unbound, and cast behind you the bones of your mother.” They heard the words with astonishment. Pyrrha first broke silence: “We cannot obey; we dare not profane the remains of our parents.” They sought the thickest shades of the wood, and revolved the oracle in their minds. At length Deucalion spoke: “Either my sagacity deceives me, or the command is one we may obey without impiety. The earth is the great parent of all; the stones are her bones; these we may cast behind us; and I think this is what the oracle means. At least, it will do no harm to try.” They veiled their faces, unbound their garments, and picked up stones, and cast them behind them. The stones (wonderful to relate) began to grow soft, and assume shape. By degrees, they put on a rude resemblance to the human form, like a block half-finished in the hands of the sculptor. The moisture and slime that were about them became flesh; the stony part became bones; the veins remained veins, retaining their name, only changing their use. Those thrown by the hand of the man became men, and those by the woman became women. It was a hard race, and well adapted to labor, as we find ourselves to be at this day, giving plain indications of our origin.

The comparison of Eve to Pandora is too obvious to have escaped Milton, who introduces it in Book IV. of “Paradise Lost”:

“More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods

Endowed with all their gifts; and O, too like

In sad event, when to the unwiser son

Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she insnared

Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged

On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.”

Prometheus and Epimetheus were sons of Iapetus, which Milton changes to Japhet. Prometheus has been a favorite subject with the poets. He is represented as the friend of mankind, who interposed in their behalf when Jove was incensed against them, and who taught them civilization and the arts. But as, in so doing, he transgressed the will of Jupiter, he drew down on himself the anger of the ruler of gods and men. Jupiter had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture preyed on his liver, which was renewed as fast as devoured. This state of torment might have been brought to an end at any time by Prometheus, if he had been willing to submit to his oppressor; for he possessed a secret which involved the stability of Jove’s throne, and if he would have revealed it, he might have been at once taken into favor. But that he disdained to do. He has therefore become the symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of will resisting oppression.

Byron and Shelley have both treated this theme. The following are Byron’s lines:

“Titan! to whose immortal eyes

The sufferings of mortality,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;

What was thy pity’s recompense?

A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain;

All that the proud can feel of pain;

The agony they do not show;

The suffocating sense of woe.

“Thy godlike crime was to be kind;

To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen man with his own mind.

And, baffled as thou wert from high,

Still, in thy patient energy

In the endurance and repulse

Of thine impenetrable spirit,

Which earth and heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit.”

Ongoing Ethnogenesis in 21st Century Balkans: FYROM and the ethnic Slav majority

2011-04-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

John James Smith

americanchronicle.com

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) is one of the world´s newest nations established towards the end of the 20th century. In September, 1991 the mixed population of ethnic Slavs (majority ca. 64%), Albanians (largest minority ca. 27%), Vlachs, Roma, Turks, and Greeks of this former Yugoslav state voted for independence in a referendum. From the outset, however, the constitutional name (e.g. Republic of Macedonia) and ethnic identity (Makedonski) of this young fledgling state have been at the centre of an intra-regional dispute spanning nearly two decades.

On the one hand, Greece, FYROM´s southern neighbour disputes any reference to the name Macedonia without a geographic qualifier. According to Greek arguments, FYROM´s constitutional name has irredentist designs on a Greek province of the same name. In addition, the Greeks consider the ethnonym Macedonian to be associated with their ancient heritage and in particular to those ancient Greek speaking tribes that lived on the lands corresponding to the Modern Greek province of Macedonia. On the other hand, Bulgaria also disputes the ethnic identity of the Slavs of FYROM, claiming that they are in fact, Bulgarians. Their claim hinges on ethno-linguistic grounds and on the historical figures which constitute part of FYROM´s pantheon of founding fathers, e.g. Ivan Hadjinikolov, Gotse Delchev, Boris Sarafov, Dame Gruev, Krste Misirkov, and Nikola Karev.

Indeed, can a nation which has yet to celebrate its 20th birthday be loaded with so much ethno-historical baggage?

Apparently so, according to the government in Skopje, the Slavic speaking majority have ample evidence to rightfully press their ancient origins as far back as Alexander the Great. They even found a group of long lost relatives among the Hunza tribes of Pakistan, who were invited and flown to Skopje by Gruevski´s government with much pageantry and fanfare and which according to the local historians, are descendents of Alexander´s troops and hence distant relatives of the ethnic Slavs of FYROM. Interestingly, while no foreign media at Skopje was able to interview the (suspicious) State guests, back in Pakistan word had spread of the tale resulting in the production of a local comedy loosely translated ´Iskander and the new Yunana (Greeks).´ The play ridicules the ethnic Slavs of FYROM as too backward, vulgar, and incompetent to be the descendents of the famous ancient Greek warrior Iskander (Alexander) reducing FYROM´s fanciful assertions to local tribal jokes. More amusingly, however, was that FYROM unaware, had not picked up on it at the time.

Arguably, the Skopje government is so highly determined to foster an ancient ancestry that its decision to import such questionable and dubious credentials reveals the government´s somewhat naïve yet desperate attempt to implement historical veracity to its national identity. One cannot help but wonder what sources the historiographers of FYROM have drawn on to produce their national narrative. Pretentious designs, not to mention the waste of thousands of taxpayer´s dollars, on exaggerated narratives with a hollow past only serves to alienate the very people who have faithfully witnessed the active engineering of their modern identity.

The question is, however, have the ethnic Slavs of FYROM accepted this monstrous deception by their government? In a recent national spree of impulsive nationalism the Skopje government set about renaming everything from highways, bridges, airports, and stadiums to controversial historical figures which has drawn the ire of some of its neighbours. Furthermore, the capital city of Skopje has been in the midst of a grand developmental building project called, Skopje 2014 which is said to feature statues, colonnaded buildings, and even a Roman styled Arc´ de Triumph. Unsurprisingly, many of Skopje´s citizens who were polled consider the Skopje 2014 project nothing more than an expression of ultimate kitsch reflecting a government in desperate denial.

Surprised? No, why should we. FYROM needs a historical past quick smart if it has any chance in establishing the ethnogenesis of a new, polished, and somewhat malleable Balkan identity whereby the ethnic Slav majority of FYROM will constitute the main ingredient in the famous regional Macedonian salad of Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and Vlachs.

Then, a couple of years ago there was also the so called ´Macedonian Prayer´ shown on national television, and according to the distributors (government sponsored?), emphasised the intricate significance and superiority of the so called ´Macedonoid race,´ presumably a race of people from whom, and unbeknown to the global scientific community, the white race was conceived. The video attempts to marry FYROM´s religious pulse with science by apparently having the voice of FYROM´s God dictate a Darwinian spread of the (white) human race from Skopje (not Africa) to the rest of the world. How can the scientific community interpret such flagrancy other than to simply shrug it off as just another case of pseudo-science whereby certain individuals in FYROM must feel both threatened and desperate subsequently establishing their own version of racial-evolution.

Again, the question is, were the ethnic Slavs of FYROM seduced by such unabashed discriminatory rubbish?

Regrettably, the expected response from FYROM´s Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) to such public racism did not eventuate and was unfortunately quite muted. Conversely, the global academic community who were first and foremost appalled by the highly racist material (reminiscent of Nazi Aryanism), refused to comment on it and dismissed it on what they perceived as nothing more than nationalistic propaganda to score political points for the government in power. There was, however, global bemusement and disappointment for all those venerated (apolitical) scholars who work at MANU, and who did not openly and concretely distance themselves (and the academy) from such racist propaganda.

As this paper intends to only look at the recent construction of identity in FYROM, it is important to keep in mind that this means only the identity of the ethnic Slav majority of FYROM. While some ethnic Slav citizens of FYROM and in particular the Diaspora contend to be descendents of and believe to have legitimate rights to the ancient Macedonians, it is significant to point out that in pre-WW II Yugoslavia the vast majority of their ancestors openly proclaimed a Bulgarian ethnicity. This can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century when in a time when most of the Balkans were attempting to liberate themselves from the Ottoman yoke, a sense of collective identity was formulated on the grounds to unite the people to a common cause. The birth of a number of revolutionary organisations created by a group of Bulgarian intellectuals conceived the idea to free the region of Macedonia from Ottoman control, extract autonomy status with the support of the European powers, and finally unite the Bulgarian people of Macedonia with their Bulgarian motherland.

Many of these intellectuals (e.g. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, Misirkov) perceived a Macedonian identity as nothing more than the regional appellation of the many ethnicities that straddled the land of Macedonia. This was most evident in the preamble of their revolutionary organisation BMARO – Bulgarian Macedonia Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation – which although a Bulgarian organisation, openly called to arms all the inhabitants of Macedonia regardless of ethnicity. Coincidently BMARO is the ancestor organisation of many contemporary political offspring organisations in both Bulgaria and FYROM under the acronym VMRO.

Here it must be stressed, that contra to the nationalistic rhetoric emanating from both Skopje and the Diaspora, the preamble was formulated and approved by its Bulgarian committee (e.g. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, etc.) to mainly signify its Bulgarian roots and Bulgarian identity in the lands of multiethnic Macedonia and Thrace (hence Adrianople). Over the years we have put forward the same question to a number of nationalists in the Diaspora about the significance of the Bulgarian identity in the preamble whereby we mostly received a series of confused, mumbled, and contradictory replies. It must be said that most of the nationalistic propaganda stems from Diasporic groups that peddle nationalistic newsletters usually filled with a good dose of historical fiction and a few pages inflamed with current politics. Many of these Diasporic groups refer to themselves with geographic qualifiers, e.g. Egeski, a term relating to the Aegean Sea in Greece. These recently invented terms give the impression that they once resided along the Aegean littoral but in reality they all come from the mountainous border regions, e.g. Florina, and have no historical, cultural, culinary, or maritime tradition to the Aegean Sea. Some see the creation of these geographic terms as irredentist designs by FYROM and her Diaspora with intentions to usurp Greek territory.

It is no secret that there is a new wave of neo-nationalism in FYROM and the Diaspora, and a lot of it is hand fed by incumbent figures who have resigned to the use of the internet as a field of propaganda to further fabricate an imaginary historical past dotted with mythologizing figures and events. Obviously, the lack of sociological knowledge in arm-chair nationalism clearly reflects the monolithic premise behind the absolute ignorance (and chauvinistic arrogance) of how the social construct of ethnic identity has always been in a state of flux or in a constant realm of becoming. The unsophisticated assumption that a regional identity (e.g. as that proclaimed in FYROM and her Diaspora) is static, rigid, and distinct to one people shows how little such assessments understand the social and conscious parameters of human agency and endeavour.

Obviously, the problem pertaining to the Skopje authorities over the years has been how to reconcile what has been termed as their antiquisationist projects (e.g. the deliberate grafting of ancient historical figures, symbols, events, onto modern national narratives) with that of their most recent past which, according to the revolutionary figures (e.g. Sarafov, Sandanski, Delchev), were deemed to be of Bulgarian stock. Ironically, it is these same Bulgarian intellectuals such as Hadjinikolov, Delchev, and Gruev whose memoirs are left to posterity, effectively dismantle FYROM´s antiquisation fairy tale based on the fact that these men (and many others) recognised and traced their Bulgarian roots back through the historical Bulgarian struggles. They saw as their direct ancestors Bulgarian revolutionaries such as Hristo Botev, Georgi Benkov and the martyr Vasil Levski (also known as the Apostle of Freedom) whose struggle to free Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke cost him his life. For example, Gotse Delchev considered Vasil Levski as his faithful ancestor, and was once restrained by his comrades from attempting to strangle to death a 16 year old youth for publicly slighting the ´Apostle.´ In addition, they drew on their Bulgarian identity to create BMARO (and later VMRO) which was a carbon copy reproduction of Levski´s revolutionary organisations. BMARO´s preamble, the slogan ´Freedom or Death,´ as well as the symbol of a crossed pistol and dagger all find their origin in Levski´s organisations in the Bulgarian struggle for freedom. Others who get mention as Bulgarian forerunners in the intellectual´s memoirs are medieval leaders such as Samuel, defeated by the Byzantine ruler Basil who not surprisingly was also known as the Bulgarslayer.

What is certain is that none of the BMARO revolutionaries had any qualms or confusion in openly declaring the Bulgarian identity of the people the preamble was meant to defend. One must not forget that the existence of BMARO was in effect just another link in a chain of revolutionary freedom movements going back to Levski as the only alternative left for freeing the Bulgarian people of Macedonia and Thrace from Ottoman rule. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, and many others repeatedly declared their Bulgarian identity in their memoirs something that was never contradicted by their followers and the rest of the Bulgarian people of Macedonia and Thrace. In spite of all this evidence, some FYROM and Diasporic commentators unconvincingly argue that these intellectuals must have been, nevertheless, confused of their ethnic identity. This then should not come as a surprise that some of these same commentators who are obviously ´confused´ by their own immediate ancestry can naively turn and claim ethnic continuity reaching back into the Neolithic period (some even claim 70,000 years), long before the conceptual birth of ethnicity, culture, and identity. Sensibly, many international academics have reasonably dismissed this and many other similar quasi-science assertions.

Even pro-FYROM academics such as some anthropologists (e.g. Danforth) and historians (e.g. Borza) have openly disclosed the recent ethnic construction of the Slavic speaking people of FYROM and distanced themselves from any ancient hyperbole. Others have likened Skopje´s (and certain Diasporic elements) antiquisation insistence as the likely outgrowth of an ´Inferior Slav Syndrome´ perceived and embodied in the national identity and fearful of being equated as a new Balkan upstart. Essentially, the theory of creating/inventing/fabricating ancient roots to provide instant ethnic legitimacy is in effect the Gordion knot which unfortunately for FYROM has yet to find Alexander´s intuition.

What then, is it that makes a segment of FYROM society (and many in the diaspora) seek their identity in antiquity? We know from reading many of the Diasporic articles that there is no shame in misappropriating historical material for nationalistic consumption. For instance, we have seen how on certain web-pages Diasporic individuals have altered the original Carnegie report of the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 to deliberately change and substitute every ethnic Bulgarian village in Macedonia (and unwittingly Thrace) to a more digestible reading along nationalistic lines for their national narrative while attempting to completely erase every Bulgarian presence from pre-Yugoslav Macedonia. This has also been the case where the Bulgarian language has been concerned.

The present Slavic language of FYROM was first codified in 1944 to purposely cleanse it of what was considered by the authorities to be to close to Bulgarian (something FYROM has yet to properly address). The question that should be asked here is, does the reassembling of various Bulgarian dialects constitute a new language (and identity)? Much of the original Bulgarian alphabet that was taught throughout the region of Slavic speakers was substituted with Serbian attributes. While I myself learnt Bulgarian in America and after nearly 35 years of research in the Macedonian region of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and FYROM, I have still to meet a villager who I did not understand. Sure many of the Bulgarian dialects spoken could be a little challenging at first, but it was never problematic in conducting our interviews. To conduct research one needs a good command of language, knowledge of customs, and most importantly mutual respect. It became obvious last year, while on a field trip researching the dialects in the southern Balkans that the Bulgarian speakers in the region of Thrace (in Greece) could (as we could) understand with amusing ease the Slavonic (or Bulgarian?) spoken in FYROM, Albania, Greece (Macedonia), and Bulgaria. One should normally ask how is it possible that a number of Bulgarians from Komotini in Thrace (Greece) were able to clearly understand the Slavic spoken in Kastoria (Greece), Ohrid (FYROM), Korce (Albania), and Goce Delchev (Bulgaria) if it is a supposed distinct, separate language to Bulgarian as some linguists attempt to claim.

The Slavic language of FYROM was recognised as an international (non-Bulgarian) language only after the assistance of the linguist Horace Lunt. One begs the question, had the highly admired linguist (Lunt) not endorsed the newly codified language in Skopje would Tito (with Stalin´s assistance) have continued on his anti-Bulgarian ethnic construction in the newly born Yugoslav state. Stalin was, nevertheless quite clear, creating new ethno-linguistic national identities seemed to be normal practice in the Soviet Union, e.g. Belarusian. Yet, in the last 30 years many Slavic linguists have made it clear that the Slavic spoken in present day FYROM is as different to Bulgarian as Austrian is to German, American to English, Brazilian to Portuguese, or Mexican to Spanish. It is said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that unity brings about a dialect, and with separation a language. This model fits like a glove with FYROM´s past. Under Ottoman rule Bulgarian dialects were present from the Black Sea across to Lake Ohrid. With the recreation of Tito´s post-WW II Yugoslavia the regional Bulgarian dialects were subsequently stripped, raped, and reproduced as a new language complete with a new Yugoslav state border and identity. Unlike Slovenian and Serbo-Croation, which are not mutually intelligible to Bulgarian speakers, although a superficial understanding can take place (e.g. such as the Romance languages - Italians can make some superficial sense of French or Spanish), the Slavic speakers of FYROM have a linguistic bond to Bulgarian even after the fervent though flawed attempts in the post-WW II period to cleanse the dialect (come language) of its Bulgarian roots.

There are those Slavic linguists (e.g. Friedman) who adamantly espouse the distinctive quality of the language spoken in FYROM but one needs to take their assertions with a grain of salt. Just as one needs to also remember, that all academics (linguists included) need a thesis to validate their position. And as such, we come to a good example of mutual intelligibility that took place in 1995 when FYROM´s President Gligorov attempted to have interpreters present to translate the proceedings between himself and his Bulgarian counterpart. He was promptly denied on the grounds that both the Bulgarian diplomats and his (Gligorov´s) entourage (especially his interpreter) found the exercise ridiculous. Later, one diplomat commented that Gligorov thought, that by having an interpreter present he would help validate a distinct FYROM language separate from its Bulgarian origin. In other words, while everyone at the diplomatic meeting agreed that the language spoken by all parties was mutually intelligible, political maneuvering by Gligorov failed to vindicate his claim. For example, Gligorov´s (interpreter) attempt was nothing short of seeing, for instance, Barak Obama requesting the services of an interpreter to translate David Cameron´s British English.

In the end, it is noteworthy to mention that no matter how much linguistic engineering took place in 1944 (even with Lunt´s approval) the social construction of FYROM´s language was absolutely incapable if not outright inept of erasing its Bulgarian origins.

Elsewhere (and quite disappointingly), there has been the FYROM government´s constant refusal to assist local and foreign research on the subject of the country´s ethnogenesis. For example, for many years applications have failed to access post-WW II archives in Skopje to understand the mass and sometimes brutal enforcement of the erasure of Bulgarian surname suffixes (e.g. –ov/ev (masc.), -ova/eva (fem.), into –ovski/evski, -ovska/evska) in a period when Tito accepted (with Stalin´s blessing) both a newly constructed ethno-linguistic Yugoslav identity with a newly created Yugoslav state. Research revealed that every region of the newly created post-WW II Yugoslav state (FYROM´s predecessor) was forced by the Skopje authorities of the time (sometimes under pain of death) to change their Bulgarian surnames into their newly constructed identities. It has remained one of the most secretive periods of FYROM´s past and continues to assert much hate among the few surviving older generation who as children remember those terrible times. Many of the eye witness accounts retell the horrific events that led to the sufficient rebaptism of the general populace. For example, many who refused to change their Bulgarian family names were first beaten in front of their families, and then forced to watch the rape of their wives, daughters, and mothers before being led away, mostly never to be seen again. This period of enforced ethnogenesis has and still remains, one of the most tragic stains of selective amnesia on the country´s conscious. It has been argued that even if the Skopje authorities opened their post-WW II archives there would be no trace of any documents alluding to both the codification of the language and the brutal enforcement of a new Yugoslav surname to promote the new post-WW II ethnic identity of what has today become FYROM.

It has taken many years of interviews and field work to capture the essence of the ethnogenesis of a new former Yugoslav state in the late 20th early 21st century. But ultimately, apart from some elements in both FYROM and the Diaspora who are firmly entrenched in some half baked fantasy of being linked to antiquity, let alone to Alexander the Great, the vast majority of ethnic Slavs of FYROM are not easily persuaded by the kitsch of historical statues or by the nationalistic overtones of the Skopje 2014 project.

No instead, it is said among many ethnic Slavs in the villages of FYROM that if we have food on the table and constant work the authorities in Skopje can build, fabricate, and rename anything they want, but please don´t leave us - Unemployed. Incidentally, another area of concern was revealed recently when Transparency International (the anti-corruption body) indicated that over 70% of people in FYROM paid bribes to receive public services. If we were to use such findings to reflect and measure socio-economic success in FYROM society today, then it is possibly safe to assume that constructing a putative ancient ancestry in FYROM receives precedence over peoples´ livelihoods.

The continuing ethnogenesis in FYROM´s national narrative is, unlike other modern European nations, still in the process of (re-)inventing itself. Eventually, it will embrace a modern identity compiled, if not completely fabricated from the mosaic of regional ethnicities whose histories, languages, cultures, and historical figures will pave both its streets and its conscience. An upcoming article will continue to explore the road of modern ethnogenesis in FYROM and assess the hybrid nature of the people of FYROM as well as the recent emphasis (and invention) of a variety of regional traditions to highlight the ongoing process of becoming.

Rome: Music From The HBO Series

2011-04-11T03:01:00.000-07:00

Released in 2007, this collection presents composer Jeff Beal's work for the acclaimed HBO series ROME. By incorporating instruments that approximate those used in ancient times, along with an orchestra, Beal succeeds in conjuring up pieces that reflect the high drama of both the era and the show (see the seductive, foreboding "Rome Main Title Theme" and the melancholy "Niobe's Theme").

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How the ancient Romans made Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

2011-04-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Monosodium glutamate is a food additive that enhances flavor. Although it's frowned upon today, the ancient Romans loved it and ate it with almost every meal.

There's been some debate over what exactly monosodium glutamate does to people. Some people say it gives them severe headaches, numbness, weakness, and even heart palpitations. Scientists could confirm that it does give some people short-lived reactions, but no tests showed that it had long-term health effects. Some say that it's an addictive substance which causes people to crave it repeatedly if they try it too often. Others say it's just a flavor enhancer, and people crave it because it makes things taste better.

The chemical is listed as 'safe' by the FDA, although they do require it to be clearly listed as an additive in any food product that uses it. It's most often found in canned soups and vegetables. Modern MSG is manufactured using genetically engineered bacteria. They take in nutrients and excrete glutamic acid. The acid is concentrated, and sodium is added to make the final product.

The process sounds very modern, but MSG has been around for a very long time. It was a common food additive during the time of ancient Rome, added to almost all Roman dishes. The Romans had a lot of technology for their time, but they couldn't genetically engineer bacteria. So how did they come up with MSG? Believe it or not, they used an even more disgusting process than bacteria excretions. The Romans had a fish paste called garum that they exported everywhere. They made it by filling pots with alternating layers of fish - or just fish guts - and salt and letting those pots lie out in the sun for a while.

As the mixture lay out in the sun, the stomach acids for the fish ate through their bodies. They eventually broke down the entire fish, turning the whole thing into a dark brown oily goo. When protein is broken down, the amino acid chains in the protein are freed up. One of these acid chains contains glutamic acid, which meets up with sodium from the salt and forms MSG. The Romans were such fans of the flavor enhancer that they even put it in sweets like custard. They also died off in droves, so anyone who wishes to recreate garum Roman-style — don't do it. Try organizing gladiator-style games in the back yard as a safer alternative.

The Oldest Readable Writing in Europe

2011-04-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says. Considered "magical or mysterious" in its time, the writing survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according to researchers.

Found in an olive grove in what's now the village of Iklaina, the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350 B.C., archaeologists say. The Mycenaeans—made legendary in part by Homer's Iliad, which fictionalizes their war with Troy—dominated much of Greece from about 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C.

So far, excavations at Iklaina have yielded evidence of an early Mycenaean palace, giant terrace walls, murals, and a surprisingly advanced drainage system, according to dig director Michael Cosmopoulos. But the tablet, found last summer, is the biggest surprise of the multiyear project, Cosmopoulos said.

"According to what we knew, that tablet should not have been there," the University of Missouri-St. Louis archaeologist told National Geographic News. First, Mycenaean tablets weren't thought to have been created so early, he said. Second, "until now tablets had been found only in a handful of major palaces"—including the previous record holder, which was found among palace ruins in what was the city of Mycenae.

Although the Iklaina site boasted a palace during the early Mycenaean period, by the time of the tablet, the settlement had been reduced to a satellite of the city of Pylos, seat of King Nestor, a key player in the Iliad. "This is a rare case where archaeology meets ancient texts and Greek myths," Cosmopoulos said in a statement.

Tablet Preserved by Cooking

The markings on the tablet fragment—which is roughly 1 inch ( 2.5 centimeters) tall by 1.5 inches (4 centimeters) wide—are early examples of a writing system known as Linear B. Used for a very ancient form of Greek, Linear B consisted of about 87 signs, each representing one syllable. The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic matters of interest to the ruling elite. Fittingly, the markings on the front of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the researchers say. The back lists names alongside numbers—probably a property list.

Because these records tended to be saved for only a single fiscal year, the clay wasn't made to last, said Cosmopoulos, whose work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. "Those tablets were not baked, only dried in the sun and [were], therefore, very brittle. ... Basically someone back then threw the tablet in the pit and then burned their garbage," he said. "This fire hardened and preserved the tablet."

Magical, Mysterious Writing

The Iklaina tablet is an "extraordinary find," said Palaima, an expert in Mycenaean tablets and administration at the University of Texas-Austin. In addition to its sheer age, the artifact could provide insights about how ancient Greek kingdoms were organized and administered, he added. For example, archaeologists previously thought such tablets were created and kept exclusively at major state capitals, or "palatial centers," such as Pylos and Mycenae.

Found in the ruins of a second-tier town, the Iklaina tablet could indicate that literacy and bureaucracy during the late Mycenaean period were less centralized than previously thought. Palaima added that the ability to read and write was extremely restricted during the Mycenaean period and was regarded by most people as "magical or mysterious." It would be some 400 to 600 years before the written word was demystified in Greece, as the ancient Greek alphabet overtook Linear B and eventually evolved into the 26 letters used on this page.

How the ancient world used color

2011-03-19T00:47:00.000-07:00

Were ancient Greece and Rome filled with dignified white marble statuary? Not a chance. A Stanford sophomore shows an ancient statue the way it was meant to be seen – in Technicolor. Her Cantor Arts Center exhibition also shows the technology that helped rediscover long-lost colors.

By Cynthia Haven

With the silent attentiveness of a physician, Ivy Nguyen passes her hands over the recumbent white lady in the darkened lab. She cradles a handheld black light in her fingers. Under the Stanford sophomore's skillful watch in the Cantor Arts Center lab, long-dead colors on marble come alive after two millennia. The results of Nguyen's painstaking efforts are on display in "True Colors: Rediscovering Pigments on Greco-Roman Marble Sculpture" at the Cantor. The exhibition runs until Aug. 7. Admission is free. Though we still think of ancient Greece and Rome in terms of white marble sparkling under a hot Mediterranean sun, the new exhibition shows at least one Greco-Roman lady as she was meant to be seen – in Technicolor. Not everyone may take to Stanford's painted lady, but first impressions can change. "It's very different – some have called it kind of garish," admitted sophomore Nguyen, but she confesses that she's gotten used to it. We've always known that ancient statues were painted: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vase, circa 360-350 B.C., depicting a man painting a statue of Herakles. The most important evidence is on the statues themselves – traces of paint that time did not wash from the creases and crevices in porous marble.

Traces of paint offer hints

Unfortunately, while those traces may tell us the statues were painted, they don't give us a real idea of what the statues looked like. Nguyen thinks sculptures may have had several layers of paint for a more nuanced effect, but since the layers closest to the surface were exposed to weathering and cleaning, only the base layer of paints lingered in the nooks and crannies of the marble.

So how do we find the invisible paint, the "true colors" that vanished over time? Nguyen, a student in chemical engineering, had a few ideas. Nguyen was a student in last spring's "Art, Chemistry, and Madness: The Science of Art Materials," a course taught by chemical engineering Professor Curtis Frank with his wife, artist Sara Loesch Frank. The course is one of the "sophomore seminar" series that give Stanford faculty a chance to explore the boundaries of their disciplines and experiment outside their accustomed areas of expertise. The interdisciplinary offerings give students an opportunity for some unusual synergies.

The course was inspired by Loesch Frank's experimentation with art material – she would ask her husband for help to explain color changes, bubbling or delamination. "Since my research area is materials science with an emphasis on interfacial properties of polymers, I was intrigued by her questions, and we put together the course in an attempt to organize our collective thinking and to share it with bright Stanford undergrads," said Frank.

For Nguyen, it was an epiphany: "Prior to this, I had always been intimidated by the humanities and arts," said the science-oriented sophomore. "It definitely showed me other things going on out there – other things besides the current trends. "Science can give us a deeper understanding of art." Nguyen submitted a proposal for an exhibition to a juried competition sponsored by the Cantor Arts Center, and won. Susan Roberts-Manganelli, the manager of collections, exhibitions and conservation at Cantor, became a colleague and leading member of the team that examined the Greco-Roman statue and planned the exhibition. (Roberts-Manganelli came into the field from the opposite direction of Nguyen: she's an artist who discovered the wonders of art conservation while traveling in Europe.)

For the exhibition, Nguyen explored techniques to detect paint that you cannot see with the naked eye – trace elements, such as lead and gold, which are not native to marble. Ultraviolet light causes the pigment particles to fluoresce, helping determine where the marble had been painted.

High-tech tool meets ancient art

While the technique is not new, Nguyen went beyond that with the use of x-ray fluorescence (XRF), commonly used in conservation sciences. XRF can find traces of pigment that are invisible to the unaided eye.

Nguyen's ultraviolet imaging with the black light reveals "ghost images," showing the areas that might be promising to test. The XRF reveals what's in those ghost images. Although other exhibitions have focused on painted Greek and Roman statues, this exhibition focuses on the science as well as the art, taking the visitor through the laboratory process with cases displaying pigments used in ancient times, wall-mounted images of the analysis and small, painted terra cotta works from Cantor's ancient collection that were used as controls in the study.

The exhibition includes those early mineral paints – chalk to create white, goethite that can be powdered to yellow ochre, hematite that can be powdered to red ochre, copper to make the pigment known as Egyptian blue and gold leaf for gilding – along with photos taken during scientific analysis. But the hit of the exhibition is clearly the painted ladies: two high-density urethane foam replicas of the Stanford's Maenad (4 B.C. – 25 A.D.), a survivor from the Herodian dynasty who was found in a Samarian well.

One of the two reproductions is painted with the colors found during analysis; a second is an educated guess about the additional layers of color that might have been added. The fully painted Samarian maenad wears a red cloak over an ochre tunic. The figure is headless, but dark hair trails over each shoulder. Over her right shoulder, she has slung a leopard-patterned animal skin. With color, she does indeed look more like a wild Dionysian follower, rather than the noble white marble matron familiar to Stanford museum visitors. Nguyen predicted in her proposal that "putting the painted reconstruction next to the statue on display will be jarring even for the most knowledgeable of visitors."

She was right. The world of ancient Greece was not an austere civilization of stately white marble – it was awash with vibrant colors. Were all the statues painted? "It's hard to say what really happened over 2,000 years ago," said Nguyen. "But we know that at least a lot of them were painted." They may look garish to us – but the Greeks felt that, without the splash of color, their statues were a little naked and, well, kind of ugly. "My life and fortunes are a monstrosity . . . because of my beauty," lamented Helen of Troy in Euripides' Helen. "If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect – the way you would wipe color off a statue."

Stanford university

The Importance of Historical Truth and The Macedonian Issue II

2011-03-10T08:41:00.000-08:00

By Professor John Melville-Jones

Following the publication of the edited version of the after-dinner talk that I gave in October, a formal complaint was made to my employer (to which a polite reply was made, stressing the importance of academic freedom), and I received an e-mailed message from the United Macedonian Diaspora (which I thought, because of its name, must be a Greek organisation until I read what it had to say), together with a number of other e-mails. Many of these were merely abusive, but this didn’t surprise me, because I know from experience that when people hold strong beliefs that are based on faith not fact, and they are shown that these beliefs cannot be true, this is distressing to them, and they will very often become agitated, as they cling to their beliefs even more vigorously. None of the messages that I received addressed the issue that I raised in my talk in Melbourne, the proposed erection of the statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje. Two of them were, however, more thoughtful, and I have had some mild and civilised exchanges with their authors, as we define our positions.

Some of the points that were made were what I would call 'diversionary', such as the statement that the present population of the Greek province of Macedonia has nothing in common with its population in ancient times, being 'colonisers', referring to the fact that many of them were brought there from Turkey in the 1920s during the exchange of populations which led to Muslims being removed from... some areas of the Balkans, and Christians from some parts of Asia Minor. I have pointed out to the persons who made this point that this is not an accurate way to describe what happened; and it is certainly not relevant to the issue that brought me into this debate (see below). Similarly, I know that in northern Greece some of the things that have been done to the Slav minority who live there, such as discouraging them from using their own language, cannot be defended (and I wonder what has happened to any Greek speakers who still live in the FYROM, but no one has told me anything about them). But I am a specialist in the ancient world, not in modern history, and again this is not relevant to the point that I am trying to make.

Anyway, I composed a reply, and sent it to everyone who had contacted me, answering some of the points that had been made, and emphasising that I was not well informed on the details of what had happened in the period of Ottoman domination or the twentieth century, although I am in fact learning more. For example, I have been looking at a book called The Contest for Macedonian Identity 1870-1912 by Nick Anastasovski, which is very scholarly and better documented, particularly in relation to Ottoman sources, than anything else that I have previously read. But it fails in its promise to show how a 'Macedonian Identity' began to be constructed in the 19th century. And one of the problems is that the word ‘Macedonian’ can be interpreted in different ways (I am reminded of the character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass, who said ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean …’).

One delightful experience was my being directed, apparently seriously, to a web site produced by two scientists in Skopje, who claimed to have shown that the middle section of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), the section occupying the space between the text that was presented in hieroglyphics and the text that was presented in Greek, was not, as has been generally supposed, written in Middle or Ptolemaic Demotic Egyptian (close to Coptic), but in the original 'Macedonian' language, which the Ptolemies, being Macedonians, were supposed to have used. This was combined with the suggestion that these original 'Macedonians' had been driven out of Macedonia by the Romans, but returned some seven centuries later to their homeland. Thus we would have a connection between the Macedonians of antiquity and the present inhabitants of the FYROM.

It is amazing that this world-shattering theory has not made the front pages of the international newspapers, even though, to judge from the comments that I have found on the web, some people in the FYROM are convinced by it. There are, however, obvious weaknesses that anyone, not necessarily a specialist in linguistics, can spot easily. In the first place, the web site dismisses the perfectly credible translation from Demotic which is provided by the British Museum. Also, the number of 'Macedonian' words that have been 'identified' by this 'scholarly' study is small (the authors do not offer a translation of the complete text, just a selection of supposed 'Macedonian' words). I discussed this with a linguist of my acquaintance, who said that if he studied the text in the same way, he would be able before too long to prove that some words in it were Finnish, Chinese or (Heaven forbid!) Bulgarian.

The nature of the language spoken by the ancient Makedónes is hard to evaluate, because so little of it remains (I will ignore the claim concerning the Rosetta Stone, and the suggestion that there are inscriptions of an early date in one or more non-Greek languages which have been discovered, but are locked up in Greek museums and kept secret). We have about a hundred and fifty words that are specifically described as ‘Macedonian’, most of them from the Lexicon of Hesychius (5th century A.D., but incorporating earlier work). The material is insufficient for a firm judgement to be made (and it should be remembered that Hesychius and his predecessors were collecting rare or unusual words, rather than listing ones that were the same everywhere), but it is clear even from this limited sample that the Macedonian language was no further from Attic Greek (which became the standard form) than the Cretan or Spartan languages, which would certainly be called Greek.

Having said this, I can restate my position and develop it a bit. The origin of the Makedónes is unclear, but they seem to have arrived in the area around Aigai (Edessa & Vergina) by the eighth century B.C. They pushed out or absorbed the Bottiaioi who lived in that region or to the south of it, and other groups such as the Pierians and Mygdonians. Over the next two centuries they settled there and expanded their territory, and although they still had a number of separate tribes, a firm succession of kings was established, and this made them stronger than other more divided groups. Some of the names of early kings that we have may be legendary, but with Perdikkas I (7th century) we seem to be on firmer ground. The territory under the control of the Makedónes continued to expand, and by the beginning of the 5th century one of their kings, Alexander I, had begun to issue coins with his own name written on them in Greek.

Several passages that survive in Greek authors of the fifth and fourth centuries suggest that the Macedonians were regarded by the southern Greeks as ‘different’. This is not surprising, since they had arrived on the scene much later than the groups that had entered the peninsula during the Bronze Age and moved southward, but it is clear from the evidence that they were, although perhaps grudgingly, accepted as being Hellenes. The situation is less clear with regard to their neighbours on the north, in an area that cannot be exactly defined, but is approximately equivalent to the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These were called the Paionians, and there were frequent conflicts as they tried to expand into Macedonian territory. At the accession of Philip II to the throne of Macedonia the Paionians joined with the Illyrians in an attempt to take advantage of the inexperience of the new king, but Philip drove them back, defeating them on more than one occasion.

When I spoke of this in my after-dinner speech, I described this event as a ‘conquest’, which was completed by Philip’s son Alexander III. This was an overstatement. The Paionians were defeated, but their territory did not become a part of Macedonia. This is shown by the fact that the Paionian kings began issuing coins bearing their own names (written in Greek of course) during the reign of Philip II, and when Alexander started making his conquests, they provided a separate contingent of cavalry in his army. They certainly remained separate from Macedonia until the Roman conquest, as their continued issuing of coinage, first in the name of their kings, and finally in the name of the Paionians themselves in the early second century B.C., shows. And in the immediate aftermath of that conquest they were still regarded as separate, if we can believe the Roman historian Livy, who tells us (XLV, 29) that the Dardanians were not allowed by the Romans to take control of Paionia, although, as they claimed, it had once been theirs, because it had belonged to the last Macedonian king Perseus (sub regno Persei), and all Perseus’s subjects had now been granted political freedom (libertas).

In later years the name 'Macedonia' was applied to a much larger area. It included some land to the north (Paionia), to the west and to the south (even including southern Greece for a while until a separate Roman province of Achaia was created). And in the centuries before the Ottoman conquest the geographical extent of ‘Macedonia’ (by now a purely administrative district, with no separate ethnic identity), varied considerably at different times. But now we are moving away from the issue that brought me into this naming dispute. This is that the territory of the FYROM was not, either in the fourth century B.C. or for many centuries after that, a part of Macedonia (except perhaps for a very narrow strip along its southern border), and that the erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje can never be justified, because it is based on a distortion of history by a people who, I am sorry to say, are trying to create a false identity for themselves.

Ensemble De Organographia - Music of Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians & Greeks

2011-02-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

De Organographia performs the music of Ancient Greece on a myriad of faithful reproductions of period instruments. Their concerts are informative and entertaining presentations using period text and song to bring to life the musical art of the distant past. The ancient Greek repertoire of De Organographia is brought alive in an improvisatory style based on precepts preserved in the writings of antiquity.

De Organographia performs on a collection of instruments of their own making: aulos (double reed pipe), lyra (Lyre), kithara (the ornate lyre of the professional musician), syrinx (panpipes), syrinx monokalamos (vertical flute), trichordon (small 3 stringed lute), psythirã (rattle), tympanon (drum), kymbala (cymbals), and salpinx (trumpet). Music of the Ancient Greeks is the title of their CD released in 1995 that includes virtually all of the extant music, an amazing group of diverse pieces dating from 500 BC to 300 AD. Included are two choral ode fragments from "Orestes" and "Iphigeneia in Aulis" by Euripides, "Hymn to the Sun", "Hymn to Nemesis" and "Invocation of Calliope and Apollo" by the Cretan composer Mesomedes, and the two most extensive pieces which are paeans from Delphi.

They were both performed there in 126 BC at the same occasion and were found carved onto the walls of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi. Ancient Greek music is unlike anything heard in concert today. The 50 or so surviving pieces range from exotic dramatic choruses written in tunings that employ microtones (musical intervals smaller than a half step) to almost modern sounding instrumental melodies.

Many are written in odd meters such as 5/4 and 15/8 (expressed in modern time signatures) which are also found in some of today's eastern European folk music. There are hymns and invocations to various gods, a skolion or drinking song, and the earliest christian hymn that survives with musical notation. Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks, comprising 24 tracks, was released in 1999.

The Neumans have presented concerts, workshops, clinics and lectures throughout the United States, Europe and Asia since 1978, and have been featured on numerous television and radio programs, including National Public Radio's "Performance Today". De Organographia recordings include "Bicinia Sacra et Profana" and "Music of the Ancient Greeks". The Neumans have lectured and performed ancient Greek music for such prestigious institutions as Oberlin Conservatory, Case Western Reserve University, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and have written for the British journal "Didaskalia: Ancient Greek Theatre Today".