triglifos-y-metopas: Two bees arranged about a honey comb, gold pendant with appliqué and granulated ornament. Mallia, Crete, Greece. 1700-1550 B.C. (Middle Minoan) [Heraklion Archaeological Museum]

triglifos-y-metopas:

Two bees arranged about a honey comb, gold pendant with appliqué and granulated ornament.

Mallia, Crete, Greece.

1700-1550 B.C. (Middle Minoan)

[Heraklion Archaeological Museum]

(Reblogged from catherinewillis)
Get it? Hot water.

Get it? Hot water.

“
When Vettius had plowed up his father’s tombstone, Augustus said: “This is truly cultivating your father’s memory.
Vettius cum monumentum patris exarasset, ait Augustus: hoc est uere monumentum patris colere, Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.10. The pun on plowed and cultivated translates well, but notice that tombstone and memory are both monumentum in Latin.
“
ἐπ᾿ ἀγορᾶς ποτε χειρουργῶν, ‘εἴθε’, ἔφη, ‘καὶ τὴν κοιλίαν ἦν παρατρίψαντα µὴ πεινῆν’.
“When behaving indecently in the marketplace, he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach,” Diogenes Laertius, Life of Diogenes [the Cynic] 6.46. The translation “behaving indecently” by R.D. Hicks is euphemistic for “masturbating” from the Greek χειρουργῶν, “working by hand” (the LSJ characteristically lists this instance as sens.obsc. without a translation). A nominal form of the same compound (χειρουργός) means surgeon, and in fact the English word surgeon itself is a derivative form of the Greek word coming through Latin (chirurgus) and then French (cirurgien/serurgien).

Snarlik by Johan Thörnqvist

“
When a distinguished man was being buried in Kyme, someone came up and asked the mourners: “Who was the dead man?” One of the Kymeans turned around and pointed and said: “That guy lying on the bier.
ἐν Κύµηι ἐπισήµου τινὸς κηδευοµένου προσελθών τις ἠρώτα τοὺς ὀψικεύοντας· τίς ὁ τεθνηκώς; εἷς δὲ Κυµαῖος στραφεὶς ὑπεδείκνυε λέγων· ἐκεῖνος ὁ ἐπὶ τῆς κλίνης ἀνακείµενος, Philogelos 154.
“
A Kymean doctor operating on someone who was writhing in pain and screaming switched to a blunter scalpel.
Κυµαῖος ἰατρὸς τέµνων τινὰ δεινῶς ἀλγοῦντα καὶ βοῶντα ἀµβλυτέραν σµίλην µετέλαβεν, Philogelos 177. I guess the Kymeans were proverbial idiots (see previous).
Kenneth Clarke suggests that Bernini’s anthropomorphic representation of the Rio de la Plata is recoiling in horror from the work of his rival Borromini across the street. View high resolution

Kenneth Clarke suggests that Bernini’s anthropomorphic representation of the Rio de la Plata is recoiling in horror from the work of his rival Borromini across the street.

Adkin, Neil. 2000. “Did the Romans Keep Their Underwear on in Bed?” Classical World, v.93, n.6: 619-620.

A quick bit of philological oneirology

Not very long ago I was telling someone about my experience of deja vu within a dream. It ranks among the stranger moments of my life. My memory of the dream has fragmented and I have only a few strong impressions of the whole, but I just found the journal entry I wrote upon waking up:

I had deja vu in my dream last night. / I went to LA, I thought for the first time, / but suddenly realized I had been there / before. I walked into a museum and / recognized everything; I kept walking / and remembered the buildings; then I / entered an old age home where I know I / had gone before with a friend—I even / reg recognized an old lady in red. I am / not sure if I drempt dreamt it before and / was really remembering it, or if I created / that memory in my dream.

It is written cursive with a black ballpoint pen. There is a sloppy retrospective circle around deja vu and a bold star in the left margin to mark it out in the journal. reg is deleted with a single horizontal stroke, while drempt is crossed out with two—disgust? laughter? It takes up the final twelve college-ruled lines on the first side of sheet 31/70 in a one-subject black-covered spiral notebook which I used as a commonplace book and for occasional notes during a summer in Alaska (I had a separate notebook for a chronological record of the trip).

The notebook was from May-August 2002 and almost all the seventy pages are filled. On the inside cover I made a list of books I read that summer in order, and, serving primarily as a commonplace book, I can place the thirty-first sheet somewhere around late June, possibly the third week—but there are no dates marked in the journal.

So what does this new bit of information tell us about the event?

  • I already remembered that it took place in LA and that I walked through a retirement home at one point and saw an old lady in red (whom I knew in the dream but don’t recognize from waking life).
  • I didn’t remember entering a museum, but I do remember walking through many buildings which were all connected with each other (of which the retirement home was one).
  • I don’t remember anything about the “friend.”
  • I’ve long assumed that I fabricated the sense of memory in the dream, but I don’t remember entertaining the idea that I had actually dreamt it previously and remembered it while dreaming.

When I wrote this note I had just woken up around 7am and I was groggy. I remember that the event came to seem gradually odder as I woke up slowly and that I wrote a longer account of the dream somewhere else. I can’t find it in the other journal. I hope it turns up in one of these boxes of old papers I’m sifting through today.

“
The plaintiff would call a bystander to witness with the words ‘licet antestari?’, and on receipt of a positive answer would, as often in Roman legal procedure, perform a symbolical act, that of touching the ear (regarded as the seat of memory) of the witness: Horace 1.c., Pliny NH 11.45, Plaut. Persa 747-8. See Nachtergael in Grec et Latin en 1982:115.
Edward Courtney on the XII Tables. Didn’t know about this.
“
Nothing is strange to the dreamer.
nihil est magnum somnianti, Cicero (Div. 2.68.141). Translators take some liberties with magnum here, which is to say, it has an interesting semantic range. Here it must be closer to strange or unusual than significant or important.
Books. View high resolution

Books.

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There is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette: the probability of winning at Russian roulette is unaffected by anything that the player may think or do. Within its rules, it is a game of pure chance. In contrast, the future of civilization depends entirely on what we think and do. If civilization falls, that will not be something that just happens to us: it will be the outcome of choices that people make. If civilization survives, that will be because people succeed in solving the problems of survival, and that too will not have happened by chance.
David Deutsch (2011)
So I have a couple important things to say about being an uncle. Isn’t it a bit eerie how we can see our own genes in other living things? Have you ever really thought about what a gene is? It turns out it’s difficult to define: abstracting genes or even geneplexes from strings of genetic code is somewhat like isolating words or morphemes or phonemes from the stream of natural speech. I guess the ability to appear in other contexts—to replicate—marks them and makes them all real things. I think this is the cutest baby I’ve ever seen, but I also think that I think that in part because my genes have taught me how to recognize themselves in other survival machines, and, except for my brother, back when I was barely making memories myself, I’ve never seen a baby who shared so many of my genes. Or maybe she’s objectively the cutest baby survival machine ever? Anyway, on a different topic, I really enjoy saying the phrase my niece. View high resolution

So I have a couple important things to say about being an uncle. Isn’t it a bit eerie how we can see our own genes in other living things? Have you ever really thought about what a gene is? It turns out it’s difficult to define: abstracting genes or even geneplexes from strings of genetic code is somewhat like isolating words or morphemes or phonemes from the stream of natural speech. I guess the ability to appear in other contexts—to replicate—marks them and makes them all real things. I think this is the cutest baby I’ve ever seen, but I also think that I think that in part because my genes have taught me how to recognize themselves in other survival machines, and, except for my brother, back when I was barely making memories myself, I’ve never seen a baby who shared so many of my genes. Or maybe she’s objectively the cutest baby survival machine ever? Anyway, on a different topic, I really enjoy saying the phrase my niece.