#dracontius

[palamedespoetry]

so like. they were kinda crazy with it huh

[blueberry-ink-93]

DRACONTIUS ORESTES

tragedy struck before i started reading lmao. introductory thoughts:

--

intro appreciation as per always. i love definitions theyre so fun

this was very funny to read right after the intro to heroides where it was basically: "the writing is mid af but its aight bc ✨love✨" lol

ancient fanfic yippee!! /j

iconic.

context and commentary yesssss

i only knew hubris and so was very pleased to learn that there are several cornerstones so to speak that define genres!

he really said generational trauma huh

this is so well worded like omg

ooh senecas agamemnon is next on my reading list!

dominatrix clytemnestra confirmed

the usage of pathology in describing the paramour (alliteration whoop) is driving me insane i want to write a thesis about it

--

other cool stuff:

the narrative is split into three parts: agamemnon/ orestes' revenge/ the madness and absolution of orestes

iphigenia lives!! cant wait to read more of my girl :3

interestingly enough cassandra instigates the murder of agamemnon. very fascinating angle as opposed to clys decade of scheming. love it

"the narrator compares clytemnestra to mythic paradigms of infamous and honourable love." ooooooooooooh

pyrrhus gets his ass beat in this one >:3

very confusion at molossus (not molasses) who is aegisthus' son recognised by iphigenia?? and saved by her??? waht :I

nevermind im stupid; pylades sends orestes away and iphigenia recognises him:

siblings!! no im not crying already why do u ask

need to read the iphigenia plays next lol (aulis & tauris)

--

in conclusion:

big huge thank you to the folks who takes the time to write introductions and forewards and prefaces and summaries & structures of the work, there is at least one (1) person who deeply appreciates the effort and loves to marvel over them :]

reading and probably posting more tonight so stay tuned ig

[dilutedh2so4]

Been reading this article on Dracontius' De Raptu Helenae for an ask, here's some interesting stuff I found there!

Something more for the idea of Helen being the centre of the narrative around which her husbands revolve

Thief, kidnapper, adulterer.. shepherd?

Interesting how Dracontius seems to show Helen's complicity, yet calls the act an abduction? Perhaps he is talking in terms of having taken her from her "true" husband

The dichotomy of his shepherd upbringing with his new royal status

I recommend reading Cichoń's paper for yourself!

[lastromanticist]

Sweet Juno would condem me for wealth

Great Minerva would hang me for battle

Yet Paris is a fool for choosing the damnation of love.

Troy will never not fall

Tell me you only have a surface level understanding of the Trojan war without telling me you only have a surface level understanding of the Trojan war

[talonabraxas]

Suddenly Cypris and her dove-drawn chariot descended from the quarter where the fiery night wheels its constellations over southern shores. Her purple doves wore bridles woven out of flowers, a red rose linked the gently undulating traces, the birds’ beautiful yoke was lilies mixed with roses. She flicked a purple whip to keep the team on course. She steered the wing beats; she controlled the feathered oars. - Blossius Aemilius Dracontius ( c. 455 – c. 505 AD)

Chariot of Venus Talon Abraxas

[littlesparklight]

If Paris was prophesied to cause the destruction of Troy, why did his parents take him back when they recognized him? Did they not care about the prophecy anymore?

In most cases, they didn't want to kill him him at all to begin with. (Not all; especially some later accounts mention what seems to be proactive/unconflicted attempts at exposure. But even here the end result is still that by the point Paris returns as a youth, they don't want to make another attempt.) So if you don't want to kill your infant to begin with, even if/as he's prophesied to be the destruction of your family and city, then having him turn back up alive ~20 years later...

For example, the resolution in Euripides' Alexandros turns into a joyful reunion and Hecuba (even more) regretful and guilty over past as well as the most recent murder attempt. Dracontius' De Raptu Helenae again has Hecuba and Priam guilty/relieved to find their son alive, even before Apollo turns up (because Kassandra and Helenos are urging for murdering Paris) to give divine backing to keep Paris alive (to do what he's supposed to). And when Paris is thought to have died in a shipwreck, Priam is grieving, and not in a relieved manner, since he/they only just got him back.

So, yes. I suppose one half of it is "they don't care anymore". (Because what decent people want to murder an innocent (child)?)

But another half might just as well be; this infant survived exposure - and if we include the Bibliotheke's "nursed by a bear", this is the sort of thing that has divine fingers all over it - and he's come back alive, and you never wanted him dead to begin with, only did what you "had to" for the "greater good"... Well, maybe the dream omen* was interpreted wrong? Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be BETTER? (Even if it still meant you exposed a baby, and one you didn't actually want to expose.)

Why wouldn't they take him back?

(*Some late variants add a second prophecy aside from the dream omen, which is a lot more plain-spoken because it's Priam going directly to Apollo's oracle, compared to Hecuba's dream and the interpretation of that.)

[astrocatarcadia]

If any of you want to understand Commodus you really can't just read modern accounts on him in books like "Evil Roman Emperors". Not even reading all of the classical sources is enough if you think they hold the absolute truth. Dio was a senator, Herodian was an elitist, and Historia Augusta was written long after Commodus' had died, and it's a book known to make up stuff. All of these sources are drastically biased, therefore they can only be trusted to certain point.

I believe that to truly start to understand him you analyse the ancient sources, putting them in their context. Try to be aware of WHO wrote them and WHY would they do it. Ancient historians wanted their writings to have a moral lesson behind them, if the emperor did something that didn't benefit their social group, it was likely he was going to be represented as a bad person, so his actions would be associated with a bad personality.

Furthermore if you take into account how other Emperors after him did NOT avoid being identified or related to him or symbolism he used show us that he and his reign were definitely NOT as bad as we've been told. Severus wanted to make himself related to the previous reigning dynasty to have a dynastic claim. He could've done associating himself with other people from that dynasty, however, he CHOSE Commodus as his adoptive brother. And it was well received!! I believe it was him too that had give the army the same treatment that Commodus so he could have them on his side. Then again, this means the army and the people did not have (at least the majority of them) this bad image of Commodus' we're always told by the ancient sources.

It's also important to take into account statuary, epigraphic and numismatic evidence!! It helps see how the emperor wanted to be seen as during different years of his reign and who his messages were meant to and by who were better received. Per example there's some inscriptions using the name of the months Commodus' used towards the end of his reign, which shows people accepted that change, at least to a certain point. And the numimastic evidence has SO MANY DETAILS... Commodus knew exactly how he wanted to be perceived. (Also there were quite a few games in honor of Commodus that kept being celebrated long after he died, thing I don't think people would've done if he was such a tyrannical awful maniac. And there's minor classical sources like the poet Dracontius and some christian authors that speak well of Commodus reign so...there's that).

With all this I've genuinely just scratched the surface, but it's important stuff to take into account. I'm tired of seeing people regard him as this tyrannical brat that was obsessed with Hercules and playing gladiator (haven't gotten too much into this in this post but I can elaborate further if any of you are interested) and everyone around him took advantage of him(I may also elaborate on this on other post). Commodus reigned during almost THIRTEEN years. One does not accomplish that by being as shitty and lazy of a ruler as he's portrayed.

The monography I recommend the most if anyone wants to learn about Commodus is "Commodus: An emperor at the Crossroads" by O.J. Hekster.

I've also read some articles about him that I can look up if any of you are interested and I've also read "The day Commodus killed a rhino" which while I think is a good approach I believe it's too superficial. I also would love to read "La Lotta politica al tempo di Commodo" by F. Grosso but I can't find it anywhere 😭. The classical sources are a must read in my opinion, even if they're only truthful to a point we can't really know and they're codependent.

However, books like "Evil emperors" by Phillip Barlag or "The roman empire" by Isaac Asimov genuinely just keep repeating the biased view the classical sources give us or even exaggerating it further.

[dwellordream]

The Word of God: Abortion and Christian Communities in Sixth-Century Gaul

“Caesarius almost entirely isolated women as the culprits of abortion. His picture of what motivated women was far from comprehensive. The connection between abortion and sexual transgression was possibly tacit in just one sermon. His characteristic phrase about chastity as the only legitimate sterilitas typified Caesarius’s real focus: married women. Here, there was some reflection on material concerns. Some women resorted to abortion ‘fearing that they cannot be rich if they were to have more children’.

The rhetorical encounter with the freeborn woman (ingenua), who expected a human production line from her slave-girls while withholding her own reproductive labour, played on a comparable idea. But this was about the pressure to maintain wealth rather than the difficulty of enduring poverty. Conrad Leyser has rightly called into question the image of Caesarius preaching non-stop to country bumpkins in rural Provence.

Recognizing the class focus of Caesarius’s discourse on abortion complements Leyser’s corrective. When he did speak about abortion in a more specific way, Caesarius was speaking about reasonably well-to-do women. His rhetoric on abortion was probably not unrelated to his most important constituency: the urban elite in Arles. Caesarius’s almost exclusive gender focus was the consequence of a broader pastoral strategy. 

As Lisa Bailey has recently argued in a study of how the sermons tackled drunkenness and sexual promiscuity, Caesarius found it rhetorically useful to tie sin to gender. His sermons painted a picture of late antique lad culture. Men bragged over who had slept with the most slave-girls. At boozy banquets drunkards ridiculed those who drank less than them for not being real men. For Caesarius, drinking and debauchery were not just a question of individual sins but of a culture of sin premised on a misconception of what it meant to be a man. 

Caesarius countered by reconstructing sixth-century lad culture as a form of masculinity gone wrong. Virility, he argued, should be premised upon self-discipline rather than excess. Binge-drinking and sexual promiscuity represented deficiencies, not distinctions, in masculinity. As a social practice abortion was presumably as hushed as male promiscuity and drunkenness were brash. 

But like his handling of promiscuity and drunkenness, Caesarius’s handling of abortion tied sin to gender. He critiqued abortion in the light of a particular kind of idealized femininity: motherhood. Abortion inverted the ideal. Across the sermons Caesarius complained that women killed their own children in the womb. Sermo 52 accentuated the desecration of maternity wrought by the ‘parricidal rite’ of abortion. 

By drinking up potions for sterility women sipped from the ‘cup of bereavement’ and rendered the ‘life of their children imperfect in an early death within the maternal womb’. This sermon even played rhetorically with the inversion when it described the woman who aborted as the stepmother (noverca) of a child not yet born. Whether or not we attribute these lines within sermo 52 to Caesarius, they were not the first to exploit a rhetorical association between abortion and novercae. 

In the later fifth century, the Christian poet Dracontius surveyed humanity’s sins. After reaching infanticide, by which the souls of blameless infants were snatched away, Dracontius moved onto abortion: ‘If only the cruel hand simply struck those who were born! But they also hasten to strike those not yet born in the belly’. The aborting adulteress was even more abhorrent than the infanticidal noverca: ‘Here the stepmother has less audacity with those born to others than the mother who does this. The stepmother’s right hand sends those already born to the shades, the mother forces children to die before they are born’.

Like Caesarius, Dracontius drew attention to the peril of drinking up potions, though, unlike Caesarius, he insinuated that the motive was to hide adultery. The negative social image of the noverca is also discernible in sixth-century texts. Gregory of Tours described how the second wife of the Burgundian king Sigismund machinated against his son ‘as is the wont of stepmothers’. 

Venantius Fortunatus echoed the idea that a woman could undo maternity through her misdeeds when he described Eve as our collective ‘mother through birth, but stepmother through sin’. To call a woman who aborted a noverca was to make a provocative point: abortion mutilated a woman’s identity as mother. Abortion also risked a more physical sort of mutilation. Through abortion women visited physical harm upon themselves and, even worse, risked their own lives. Often, unbeknown to themselves, they conceived in sterility. This sterility was not a passive state but a more actively disruptive force. 

Whether or not it killed an infant in the womb, it damaged a woman’s natural capacity to bear children and rejected God’s will. This was a kind of harm (damnare) which flirted with damnation. Finally, reproduction was social. The ingenua who shrank from procreation nonetheless insisted that her slave-girls bore children. She did this precisely to perpetuate a certain social order. Here, Caesarius shared more than one assumption with this imagined hypocrite. 

First, in late antique Gaul and other early medieval societies, status profoundly affected individual agency in sex, marriage and reproduction. Neither Caesarius nor ingenuae questioned the social expectation that masters and mistresses would influence reproduction among their slaves. Second, both Caesarius and these imagined hypocrites presumed that women bore a special responsibility for perpetuating the social order. 

Where they diverged was on which kind of social reproduction should take precedence. Caesarius aimed to form a community that welcomed children who could become good Christians. It should be stressed that Caesarius, the author of the first western regula for nuns, was no crude pronatalist. He discouraged people from trying to have children by any means whatsoever. 

Moreover, in contemporary conceptions of sanctity the spiritual connotations of maternity could be transposed onto men. Caesarius’s hagiographers drew upon maternal and other images of nurturing women to convey his holiness. He loved his enemies ‘not only with a paternal but also a maternal affection’. By lopping off silver embellishments from columns and handing over chalices and censers to ransom Burgundian captives, he acted as a kind of spiritual midwife who ‘made the womb of the mother [church] open up for children; he did not cause it to be harmed’.

The contrast with the fluidity of gender in sixth-century sanctity strengthens the impression that Caesarius’s construction of abortion as a female sin was the product of a deliberate pastoral strategy. But it was a pastoral strategy in tension with what Caesarius had to say about sexual and marital morality. Although sexual renunciation was a higher calling than marriage, Caesarius did consider marriage properly practised to be spiritually virtuous. 

On the sliding scale of sanctity the married had their own niche and corresponding biblical model for emulation: while virgins looked upon Mary and widows upon Anna, wives were to model themselves upon Susanna. Married couples who preserved mutual fidelity and had intercourse with a desire for children would number with Job, Sara, Susanna and others in heaven.

Antoni Zurek has rightly contrasted Augustine’s conception of three goods of marriage (faithfulness, procreation and sacramentality) with Caesarius’s narrower emphasis on procreation as the defining norm in marital sexuality. But chastity, the proper exercise of sexuality in marriage, was inextricable from what made procreation normative in conceptions of marriage. 

Caesarius’s emphasis on procreation was not premised upon the teleology of the sexual act or genital organs along the lines of some modern natural law arguments (the natural function of the sexual act and sexual organs is ordered to procreation, therefore the sexual act has to be open to procreation). Rather, for Caesarius the absence of procreative intention revealed that one had been conquered by lust. 

After his rebuke of the ingenua in sermo 44 Caesarius turned to chastity by addressing men. A good Christian man would not know his wife except from a desire for children. Imagine, he asked, if a man sowed his land in a single year as often as he slept with his wife when overcome by lust. The point was that ‘no land which is sown frequently within a single year can yield proper fruit, as you well know’.

But, crucially, the field did not represent the female body, it represented men’s own bodies and repeated sowing stood for the debilitating effect of lust upon it. Similarly, Caesarius enjoined men to abstain from their wives on Sundays, feast-days and during menstruation. Worse for drink, he noted with disdain, some men did not spare pregnant wives from their sexual advances. Children born of liturgically or physiologically transgressive intercourse, he warned, would turn out to be lepers or epileptics. 

The pastoral challenge was that double standards in sexual mores were the norm in sixth-century society. Sexually dissolute men insisted that their wives came to marriage as virgins. People acted as if God had given separate rules to men and to women, forgetting that there was a single redemption for both sexes. Caesarius used an etymological commonplace – man (vir) came from strength (virtus) and woman (mulier) from weakness (mollities) – to highlight the hypocrisy by which men expected their wives to battle against lust while they succumbed to lust’s first blow.

Caesarius did not mince his words on sexual double standards any more than he did on abortion. Precisely because of this there was a tension at the heart of his message. In critiquing sexual double standards perhaps Caesarius truly did ‘sp[eak] up in defense of women’. Caesarius visualized the breakdown of social order during the siege of Arles in 507/8 most powerfully when he painfully relived sexualized violence, the ‘mothers of families abducted, pregnant women cut apart’.

However, as Suzanne Wemple has put it, ‘[e]ven this sympathetic observer of women’s plight failed to perceive that men might have been more responsible for abortions and infanticides than women in a society where double sexual standards prevailed’. The isolation of women as the culprits of abortion complemented, rather than countered, the sexual double standards which Caesarius attacked elsewhere. 

The contrast with Augustine is illuminating. Augustine had addressed abortion and preventing conception in moral advice addressed to husbands as well as wives. Although Caesarius situated abortion within marriage, by tying sin to gender he did not clearly address his message on abortion to those who, on his own terms, needed to hear it most: husbands. 

 Caesarius instructed women to let others adopt any children whom they could not rear themselves. Precisely who these others might have been is not immediately clear. It may be tempting to think of monasteries as possible sources of support. But Caesarius’s regula for the nuns of St Jean at Arles tentatively set the age of entry at six or seven years and explicitly criticized parents who tried to use the monastery as a boarding school for their daughters.

Slightly earlier and later evidence of regulation on abandoned infants, however, provides glimpses of social practices which Caesarius had in mind. First, there were the fifth-century councils in southern Gaul. The council of Vaison (442) outlined the preferred procedure when anyone found an abandoned infant, a ruling that was repeated at another council at Arles which met at some point between 442 and 506. 

After the rescuer had informed the local church, the priest would announce the discovery of the child to the people. Parents had ten days to reclaim their infant and the rescuer was eligible for compensation. But if parents tried to reclaim their infant after this period or pursued a case against the rescuer, they would be liable (curiously enough) to the penalties for murder. 

The real point of this ruling was to protect those who had found abandoned infants from litigation which would discourage others from doing the same. Caesarius knew these rulings well. The council of Agde (506), an important moment early on in Caesarius’s episcopate, declared that previous conciliar enactments on abandoned infants were to be observed, a reference to Vaison or Arles.

Second, a late sixth-century model document from the earliest surviving formulary, the Formulae Andecavenses, outlined what should happen if the poor attached to a church found an abandoned sanguinolentus (literally, ‘covered in blood’). After gaining approval from the priest and making genuine attempts to identify the parents, the rescuers were entitled to sell the infant to a third party.

Again the point was to provide legal protection for those who found abandoned infants. The rescue of abandoned infants was sufficiently conceivable – but also contestable – to require both conciliar action and legal documentation. At least one sermon suggests that not everyone in the Christian community supported such social practices on the abandoned infants. Here, we must return to the apparent non-sequitur near the end of sermo 19. 

To reiterate: after a theologically focused account of attitudes to sickness and health Caesarius moved on to abortion with the phrase, ‘And relying on your charity, I advise all your daughters, out of paternal concern, that no woman should take potions for abortion [etc.]’. The allusion to charity is a clue to what was really going on. Caesarius hoped that his admonitions would ripple through the community as Christians reminded one another of their sins. 

But Caesarius also recognized that he needed his listeners’ charity in receiving these admonitions and elsewhere he often cushioned moral criticisms with appeals for this receptive charity. In sermo 19 the appeal to charity functioned in both ways. It was the source of the admonition, a paternal concern over his spiritual daughters’ sins, but also a cushion for what was an address to fathers in particular. 

This was not a non-sequitur, for the preceding theology of health and sickness emphasized divine providence: God always knows what is best for us. Might this have included having a pregnant daughter? In societies where the hierarchical nature of parent-children relations is pronounced and unwed mothers become a source of shame or dishonour to family groups, recourse to abortion is often a response to direct or anticipated parental pressure.”

- Zubin Mistry, Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900

[graywyvern]

( "netflix 2057" by @beeple / via )

Extreme Wisteria.

"Another term that should be briefy glossed is Reinhart Herzog’s concept of Leitreminiszenz, ‘leading reminiscence’, which occurs when one particular place or character in the Virgilian hypotext is repeatedly used for one particular phenomenon in the centonic hypertext." --Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, writing in Greece & Rome 63.2

"The coming war haunts them all."

I remember David Slavitt "translated" Ausonius's Nuptial Cento by building an equivalent out of lines of Shakespeare instead of Virgil. (I suppose he could have tried to use a line-for-line literal translation, such as Copley's.) Still, the idea fascinates me--like another act of impossible translation, Perec's La Disparition...

And--what do you know?--this led me to a modern study of the Medeas of Dracontius & Hosidius Geta: "It has recently been discovered that the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th century Byzantine manuscript, contains in palimpsest form, among other treatises, the first page of a treatise by Archimedes called Stomachion. The game of generating likenesses that Ausonius describes is the by-product of the much more complex mathematical problem addressed by Archimedes. To the astonishment of the team of scholars who have rediscovered and retranslated the palimpsest, Archimedes’ treatise appears to be the first known study of combinatorics, a field of mathe-matics that until now was not known to have existed in antiquity, and which isan essential component to the study of probability. Rather than an exercise inimagination on the part of a player who could manipulate the pieces into aninfinite variety of new shapes, the mathematical challenge of the stomachion was to discover by mathematical reasoning how many different ways the four-teen pieces of the square could be re-assembled into a square of the same dimensions. Archimedes most likely had solved this problem, but since only thevery beginning of the treatise remains, it is impossible to be sure. In 2003, mathematicians and computer scientists from Stanford University and the University of California at San Diego took six weeks to find a solution: 17,152, or 536 geometrically distinct solutions, each multiplied by 32 symmetries. In short, the game Ausonius was playing is analogous to a cento, in which pieces can be assembled in an infinite number of ways. What Archimedes was doing is more like the work of Borges’ Pierre Menard in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’—finding ways to create an object identical to, yet not the same as,its original."

Banned phrase.

[palamedespoetry]

Do I strike deadly iron into my mother’s womb (the womb that was the path of life, the gate to this great world)? She endured dangers and goading pain for ten long months to bear me conceived in her womb, the seeds of nature, the first elements of sweet life. But when my lot was drawn and I attained my birth right, she pressed to my lips breasts that flowed with milk, the sweet honey pouring forth the taste of nectar.

My mother became my nurse, my queen became my servant knowing no sleep, she showed a parent’s devotion. She was my father and mother both when my father was at war until age had relieved me of my eleventh year.

Shall I show myself unmindful of my mother’s great blessings? Or will my murdered father remain unavenged by me?

— Orestes in Dracontius' Orestes, Transl. Paul Roche

[blueberry-ink-93]

GREETINGS YALL

according to what ive read so far ive officially finished my third year of uni lol and the first half of my degree yay :D (altho i still have a summer term left but im not complaining)

anyhows thank u all for being so cool and patient and holding my hand as i spiralled and went on subtangents of tangents, i look forward to many more years of insanity with my moots lmao <3

ive plenty of things to do this summer esp before term starts (online whoop whoop!) like more driving exams lol and finally going to the gym (healthy coping mechanisms ew) and reading the 65432123 books i have and yelling about them here as well as writing stuff hopefully so i can start the next phase of uni with a clearer mind :'D

off the top of my head heres what i have so far:

essays: besides fic stuff i want to start writing essays on this blog from analysis criticism or just sharing bits and bobs from my life and language and culture from time to time :> the one i have in mind atm is for sinners (as i have threatened to write in my reblogs XD) and me just yapping about the video essays ive binged this week lol

kindred reads: good lord i have so much to read; greek stuff (dracontius, a few plays, and the iliad- odyssey- aeneid)/ essay & non fiction stuff (blues people, orientalism, two books i have on the ottoman empire and one abt the black death etc)/ childhood classics and faves i want to revist. listen i need the whimsy okay :')

fic stuff: going to try my hardest to kick the writers block in the face before it kicks me (pro gamer move) and write stuff for willow and probably bayan? jazzys going on the shelf for now lol or ill write like an au timeskip thing bc i want to skip on the character study and just write her raising her girls fkdjjfd. i can imagine how confusing this paragraph is lol so i wont be providing context bc i think im funny. also pylectra stuff is in the works muehhhehe

thats all i can think of now lol thank u for reading this far and sticking around so long :D will be probably back in a bit bc i tend to remember everything right after hitting post lmao

[dilutedh2so4]

do we know if helen's abduction had any relation with hesione's kidnapping?

This is a brilliant question!

It would make some sense for this to be the case, but unfortunately we only have late sources creating this connection. While Herodotus does makes Paris’ abduction of Helen part of a chain of kidnappings (despite including Medea in that list, and later stating Paris had “given Helen wings”), he makes no mention of Hesione.

We then have the much later Dares Phrygius, who explicitly gives her as a motivation for Paris’ raid on Sparta. Priam sends Antenor to ask for his sister back, but each Greek king he appeals to refuses and insists that no wrong had been done. Paris is then sent with a fleet to attack Greece and regain Hesione. However, they stop on the island of Cythera (just off the coast of the Peloponnese) to sacrifice at a temple. Helen also decides to go there, seeking to see Paris’ beauty. (The text then says they spent some time just staring at each other! xD) Paris takes Helen home with him, along with some captives from the raid, which is said to delight Priam as he hopes to use this as a bargaining chip. But when the Greeks do send an envoy, asking for Helen and reparations, Priam recalls the killing of his father and the treatment of his own envoy and decides he wants war!

Dracontius’ De Raptu Helenae seems to make one event lead into another. Priam sends Paris to Salamis to ask Telamon for Hesione’s release. Telamon refuses, saying he has legally married Hesione and she has born him a son. The Trojans leave in defeat, and storms separate the ships on the voyage home. Paris’ ship lands in Cyprus, where he meets Helen and they elope.

TLDR; it is a very interesting idea to explore, however not many texts link the two — and the ones that do are from late antiquity!

special thanks to @littlesparklight and this post for helping me with this :D

[jbpiggin]

Humanist's Astronomy Book

The personal library of the great Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) was scattered after his death. It remains a thing of fascination for every scholar. It's the definitive overview of what an early Renaissance man with the income to buy books read, with Coluccio's own notes scattered in the margins. Coluccio's private copy of the Great Stemma formed for a while the title picture on my Twitter account. (I replaced it with the current gaudy recreation because parchmenty pictures don't work as panoramas.) Thanks to digitization a good many of his books are now online to inspect.A real treasure among their number is Collucio's private copy (in Latin) of the Almagest by Ptolemy the Geographer, Vat.lat.2056, which has just arrived online at the Vatican Library digital portal.The diagrams are fascinating. The first image below is from a celebrated rota used by astrologers; you can read off the climates here, starting with the mouth of the Dniepr at top:

We continue to wait for Vatican's DigiVatLib to do color versions of the Florentine notary's books, such as his Seneca, Reg.lat.1391, which is still only available in black and white.

Reg.lat.675

Reg.lat.901

Reg.lat.997

Reg.lat.1072

Reg.lat.1082

Reg.lat.1110

Reg.lat.1115, a major compendium of magic (Jacobus Faber Stapulensis), astrology and astronomy (John of Glogau); this was on the site in murky black and white, but is new in color; a vital improvement since it is far from easily legible. See eTK for contents.

Reg.lat.1119

Reg.lat.1122

Reg.lat.1126

Reg.lat.1144

Reg.lat.1152

Reg.lat.1156

Reg.lat.1159

Reg.lat.1160

Reg.lat.1161

Reg.lat.1162

Reg.lat.1170

Reg.lat.1184

Reg.lat.1196

Reg.lat.1207

Reg.lat.1226

Reg.lat.1234

Reg.lat.1246

Reg.lat.1257

Reg.lat.1266

Reg.lat.1267, contains the only complete text of Dracontius, the African author, and his Satisfactio. One of the Beneventan script examples compiled by Lowe (and a prime exhibit in a mistaken theory that Visigothic and Benevantan script are linked), it is composed of different parts, miniscule at first, then Beneventan from folio 139:

Euclid, Boethius, ff 1-135, 13th century, including the glorious diagram below

Beda, ff 136-138, 11th century

Calendarial matter, ff. 139-140v and part of 143, 9th-10th century

Versus Marci Poetae de S. Benedicto, ff 141v-142v, 10th century 

Dracontius, Satisfactio, ff  143v-150v, 9th-10th century 

Reg.lat.1269

Reg.lat.1275

Reg.lat.1289

Vat.lat.1927

Vat.lat.1944

Vat.lat.1954

Vat.lat.1956

Vat.lat.1965

Vat.lat.1980

Vat.lat.1982

Vat.lat.1987

Vat.lat.1999

Vat.lat.2006

Vat.lat.2007

Vat.lat.2024

Vat.lat.2032

Vat.lat.2042

Vat.lat.2046

Vat.lat.2047

Vat.lat.2056, Ptolemy's Almagest, see above

Vat.lat.2069

Vat.lat.9484

Vat.lat.15399

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 128. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2wP9nMp

[palamedespoetry]

funniest part of dracontius' orestes is when he spends two pages asking agamemnon's shade to help him enact revenge on clytemnestra and aegisthus in graphic detail about the violence he wishes to inflict upon them and agamemnon just responds like. leave me alone son

[palamedespoetry]

I shall sing of sorrowful joys and cursed triumphs: of a victor, killed instead of praised, and bloody feasts, of his long-desired death and the mournful prayer of his Ilian wife (who could not herself cut Atrides’ throat); of laurel garlands glistening red with regal gore and the leader’s diadem spattered with his brains.

I’ll sing too of Orestes, mindful and oblivious of a parent, a matricide, pious in impiety, a man of immoral integrity. I’ll sing of unjust gods whose savage plan was just; of an innocent defendant and the Taurian temple that purged him of the Sisters: a virgin saved him from disaster, a priestess, better sister, deceitful in her pious crime.

I ask you, Melpomene, descend from your tragic regalia, let the iamb fall silent amid these resounding dactyls. Give me power to narrate the son’s laudable infamy and pardon publicly the man [the Sisters damned]. Inflamed by grief, stirred by shame and exalted in rage, his mind supported and sustained him, good intentions drove him on.

Pious fury, sinful piety equipped him with a sword and healing madness spurred him to put right the honours destroyed and the victor’s arms buried when an instigator of crime cut down crime’s avenger, a champion of marriage was slain as the bedchamber watched, and a lover of the marriage bed lay dead before its feet.

— Proem and invocation of Melpomene in Dracontius' Orestes, Transl. Paul Roche

[palamedespoetry]

i'm only a little more than half way through dracontius' orestes, but have some highlights i took of orestes and pylades in the poem. i think they're neat!