Day: January 30, 2023

Thelxinoe ~ Classics News for January 30, 2023

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Hodie est a.d. III Kal. Feb. 2776 AUC ~ 9 Gamelion in the second year of the 700th Olympiad

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“Who drives us to outrageous action? Is it some god, or does each man make of his own desire a god, which then drives him furiously to a violent end”? This is the question we consider this week as we turn to the final quarter of the epic (books 9-12). And we are treated to two surprising events: first, how the ships of the Trojans are transformed into mermaids, shocking Turnus and his gathered Rutulians. Juno is up to her old tricks, and sends along Iris the messenger to tell him not to worry, the Trojans will be trapped in Italy where they can be easy prey for the indigenous hero and his assorted forces. Aeneas is off-scene, still wandering through the regions of Arcadia, securing alliances with Evander and company. The second episode is the midnight raid of Nisus and Euryalus. In a nod to – or perhaps improvement upon – Homer’s Iliad 10 and the gruesome death of Dolon at the hands of Odysseus and Diomedes, Vergil here tells his own tragic story of two friends overtaken by greed and a desire for bloodlust. It’s not all grim, however. Along the way you can spot silos of Pringles™, the grit of Fig Newtons™, a brief excursion to the admittedly grim Battle of the Little Big Horn, and some Uncrustables™. One might say that mixing the serious with the silly has become Jeff and Dave’s ™. So tune in!

In the third installment of my Greco-Persian war series we take a look at the Interbellum. The years between Marathon and Thermopylae.  A pivotal decade for both Greek and Persian alike. Alliances were an incredibly shaky proposition in ancient Greece but they would need something rock solid if they were to resist the coming enemy. We look at the Athenian naval build up during the period, the result of the visionary called Themistocles. Fortunately for the allies, Sparta had at her command the Peloponnesian League but the city of Lycurgus had two very new kings, with unstable thrones, in power at the time. They missed Marathon, Greece could not afford for them to miss what came next. Lastly, we’ll head east and go into the detail around the build up of Xerxes’ forces in Persia. He assembled a mighty army and navy, and the steps he took to get them to Greece were nothing short of astounding.

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Today on the Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar:

If it thunders today, it portends an abundance of deaths.

… adapted from the text and translation of:

Jean MacIntosh Turfa, The Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar, in Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.), The Religion of the Etruscans. University of Texas Press, 2006. (Kindle edition)