What are your favorite classics blogs?
I want to replace my former favorite, since they have offended my librarian soul.
![[At least your crappy job means you’ll never have to worry about your friends assassinating you for it]Via someecards](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6d822ff7a57ddb81b3aa42583f2fde75/tumblr_mjphbbQ5Hu1qcf7syo1_500.png)
[At least your crappy job means you’ll never have to worry about your friends assassinating you for it]
Via someecards
eush:
Ancient Greek black figure pottery-inspired nails, featuring Theseus facing the Minotaur on one hand, and Oedipus pondering the riddle of the Sphinx on the other. Matte finish for an extra pottery-ish look!
Great. Googaly. Moogaly.
I just got even more motivation to quit biting my nails. (It’s been a rough few months, but I’m mostly succeeding.)
Where? How? I need this immediately.
eush:
If I were the Valentine’s kind (and I most definitely am not—well, it depends), these would be perfect. Especially the third one.
More Mythology-lady valentines! Less monstrous, no less dangerous. Well, except for the Graeae, they’re just old and creepy. Like last time, HERE is a full sheet of all four, print away, freefreefree!
So this time we have an Amazon, a Maenad, half-crazed worshipper of Dionysus, the enchantress Circe, and the Graeae or Gray Sisters, who are NOT the Fates, Disney… Again, I referenced artworks for their appearances. The Graeae are not very well-represented in the greek canon, though, so I drew from that delightful genre of Hellenistic art: Statues Of Decrepit Old Ladies.
First set is here! Thank you everyone, by the way, who have supported that first set! I hope you like this one, too!
"One of the first things you learn when you learn classical Greek, as I did during suicide weather when I was eighteen, is the existence of two untranslatable monosyllables — particles, they are called, not really full-fledged words at all — whose presence in any given sentence tells you about the balance of that sentence, when its rhythm and, ultimately, its meaning will be. Each of these two particles is always the second word in whatever clause it appears. The first of these particles which is transliterated as men, is always the second word of the first, x part of a sentence, and the second, which is rendered as de, is always the second words of the second, y clause. When you’re a beginning Greek student, you’re told to translate the first of these as “on the one hand,” and the second as “on the other,” but each, by itself, means nothing, really; they merely add flavor and structure to a sentence."
— The Elusive Embrace
ὣς οἱ μὲν Τρῶες φυλακὰς ἔχον: αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὺς
θεσπεσίη ἔχε φύζα φόβου κρυόεντος ἑταίρη,
πένθεϊ δ᾽ ἀτλήτῳ βεβολήατο πάντες ἄριστοι.
ὡς δ᾽ ἄνεμοι δύο πόντον ὀρίνετον ἰχθυόεντα
Βορέης καὶ Ζέφυρος, τώ τε Θρῄκηθεν ἄητον
ἐλθόντ᾽ ἐξαπίνης: ἄμυδις δέ τε κῦμα κελαινὸν
κορθύεται, πολλὸν δὲ παρὲξ ἅλα φῦκος ἔχευεν:
ὣς ἐδαΐζετο θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν.
—
So the Trojans held their watch that night but not the Achaeans —
godsent Panic seized them, comrade of bloodcurdling Rout:
all their best were struck by grief too much to bear.
As crosswinds chop the sea where the fish swarm,
the North Wind and the West Wind blasting out of Thrace
in sudden, lightning attack, wave on blacker wave, cresting,
heaving a tangled mass of seaweed along the surf —
so the Achaeans hearts were torn inside their chests.
-The Iliad, Book IX, lines 1 - 8 (Fagles’ translation)
(via fuckyesitaly)
m4ge:
if you don’t think history is amusing then you’re wrong because one time 3 different guys declared themselves pope all at once and they all excommunicated each other and it was basically the funniest shit ever
what about that time the Lichtenstein army sent 80 men to Italy to fight and came back with 81
what about the time when a guy tried to assassinate the archduke, failed, and threw himself into a 2 inch deep river in a suicide attempt
Or that time a senator got really pissed off at another senator and beat the living shit out of him with a cane
or that time a short french guy tried to invade Russia
in winter
why is nobody talking about the Anglo-Zanzibar war
it lasted 38 minutes
or that time the whole town of gotham pretended to go catch contagious derangement to avoid having king john i build a royal highway through the centre of their village
and it totally worked
or that time a bunch of colonists dumped tea in a Boston port
and pretended it was Native Americans
or that time they tried to kill Rasputin and after poisoning him with enough cyanide to kill him several times over; beating him; shooting him four times; and then rolling his body up in a carpet and it in the river because they thought he was finally dead and in the end he ended up having drowned
Or that time when Australian Premier Jack Lang attempted to rob the Reserve Bank during the Great Depression because he thought it would help.
How about that time Romans banished the Carthaginians and said “you lot, stay there, if you cross the border we will END you” and so some other peasanty dicks jumped over the Carthage border, stole stuff, and jumped back, so many times that Carthage just threw a shit, went over the border to fight them, and were destroyed by Rome.
or the the time alexander the great got drunk and burned down persepolis literally on a dare
Can we please discuss the time a Roman emperor got captured and turned into a living footstool by the Persians?
"
και συ τεκνον;
“And you, child?"—
Purported last words of C. Julius Caesar, assassinated outside the Theatre of Pompey in Rome on March 15, 44 BC.
Although his final words are widely thought to be “Et tu, Brute?”, these in fact come from Shakespeare’s play, and not from a historical source. Suetonius reported that others believed Caesar’s last words to be those quoted above, but believed for himself that Caesar said nothing as he died.
(via ancientpeoples)
File under: things I bring up whenever even vaguely applicable.
