#passim

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Equipe di Oggi venerdì, 13 giugno 2025

[davidisen]

Dinty Child at Passim, Jan 20, 2024

Paula and I got to see Dinty Child and his fine band last Saturday.

It was a record launch. I've never heard or seen him (and his) before. I was impressed. Good stuff. Clever lyrics. Excellently executed. The band included Zachariah Hickman, Alisa Amador, Rich Hinman, Lizzy Ross, Kai Welch, Annie Lynch, Kevin O’Connell, but don't ask me who was who.

This was the cute part. I think these were the grandkids.

[youaretheairinmyalveoli]

Veggie Planet / Club Passim

[rausule]

Jeremia Toe hy die lyste betree het, het G. direk te staan ​​gekom voor die morele en godsdienstige korrupsie wat onder die mense gewoed het (V, 7 e.v., en passim in die eerste hoofstukke) wat magtiges en plebejers opgeroep het tot getrouheid aan die pakt wat die hele nasie aan Jahve verbind het (II , 1 e.v.). Terselfdertyd het hy die dreigende inval aangekondig van 'n volk wat uit die noorde sou neerdaal (IV, 5 e.v.): watter indringer, volgens baie kritici, die Skithiërs is, wat op daardie tydstip die hele Anterior Asië oorstroom het (vgl. Herodotus, I, 103-106), volgens ander en met groter fondament is die nuwe en sterk Babiloniërs.

In die vyfde jaar van sy bediening (621 vC) het 'n gebeurtenis van die grootste godsdienstige belang plaasgevind: volgens die verhaal van II (IV) Konings, XXII, 8 e.v., is die "Boek van die Wet" in die tempel ontdek. van Jerusalem. Baie is oor die betekenis van hierdie verhaal betwis: die minste waaroor kritici saamstem, is dat die gepubliseerde boek ten minste ooreengestem het met die meeste van Deuteronomium (v., en pentateug); dit is ook seker dat die nuwe boek dadelik so 'n gesag geniet het dat dit normaalweg die sogenaamde "hervorming" van koning Josia was, wat met opregte ywer probeer het om die voorskrifte wat deur die suiwerste Jahvisme geïnspireer is, uit te voer. Hierdie kapitaalgebeurtenis het egter geen ooglopende reperkussies in G. se geskrifte nie; maar dit beteken nie dat hy teen óf die gepubliseerde boek óf die hervorming wat daaruit spruit nie, net dat 'n mens weerspieël hoe die lewende beginsel beide van G. en van die boek dieselfde was, dit wil sê die stryd teen sinkretisme en die establishment van suiwer Yahvism in die praktyk.

[tvntheatre]

I lost my ability to draw, toss take these motherfuckers!

The three in the center are vent drawings that were too good to pass up.

[passive-frown-inc]

Hey do you ever >:3

No, not really... that's more PM's thing.

[rustedpipe]

resisting the urge to tell this musician to put the fucking guitar down. in the nicest possible way because it is literally holding them back as a performer and it’s clear they hate guitar

[deathlessathanasia]

Was Eirene associated with spring?

Unsure. Looks like she was associated with the harvest season.

"There is a natural connection between Eirene (Peace) and Opora (Harvest, Autumn), two personifications found exclusively in the circle of Dionysos on Attic vases also from the period of the Peloponnesian War (431-404). Eirene was earlier known as one of the Horai (Seasons), presumably the autumn season in which everyone was freed from military duties and devoted their attentions to reaping the ripened crops (Simon, 1986: 700). Opora, which suggests the ripened fruit (as in epic, e.g. Homeros, Ilias 22.27, and Odysseia 11.192 and 24.343-344) as well as the time at which the fruit becomes ready for harvest, must be the same general season (LSJ s.v. ὀπώρα). In a Dionysiac vein, Stafford restricts opora to the grape harvest, which she places in late summer (2000: 187). Michael Silk likewise translates Opora as “Summer” (Silk, 2000: 130 n. 74). … In deciding whether to translate Opora as Summer or Autumn we are mediating between the three- and four-season view of the calendar. Yet Opora is highly relevant to the abstract, political meaning of eirene as the crops could not come to fruition in times of war. This was one of the greatest problems for the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War: from its beginning (431/430), Spartan forces repeatedly ravaged the Athenian countryside and crops (Thoukydides 2.19, passim). Because of the Spartan assaults, Opora was absent during most of the Peloponnesian War, and one might surmise that she would only arrive when Eirene was present. Aristophanes made this connection in Eirene (produced in 421). In this play, Opora and Theoria (Spectacle, particularly Festival Embassy) attend Eirene, who had been buried by Polemos (War) and eventually recovered by the farmer Trygaios (Aristophanes, Eirene 520-526). … Her companions in later fifth century comedies, especially Opora and Georgia (Agriculture), however, suggest her role as a fertility deity (fr. 294 KA [from another play named Eirene] actually names Georgia as her sister). She is certainly worshipped as such by Aristophanes’ farmers (in Akharneis 26 and Eirene 360) and may have been worshipped by actual Athenians, at the Dionysia." - Polis and Personification in Classical Athenian Art by Amy C. Smith

Eirene was also associated with Ploutos, personification of wealth and agricultural abundance, a god often connected with Demeter. This seems to reinforce her ties to agriculture. But what season would she be associated with exactly? Honestly, I don't know. It seems that sowing usually took place in autumn, but apparently spring sowing was also possible. The vine was also planted either in autumn or spring. Judging by Hesiod's instructions in Works and Days the time for harvesting was late spring, but maybe other ancient Greeks did things differently, maybe things changed over time or were different based on the region. Then there is the problem of various crops: you wouldn't harvest, say, grain, olives and grapes at the same time. I freely admit to knowing little to nothing about agriculture though, ancient or modern.

So... late spring? Late summer? Autumn? You could make an argument for any.

[eesirachs]

What is the ketonet passim?

the כְּתֹ֥נֶת פַּסִּֽים—the sleeved robe. fabric afforded to the youngest son, the irregular inheritor of israel, a forefigure of the prophetic mantle, a feature that moves the narrative into a hole, across slavery, into egypt. formal, in its style and in its serving of the structure of the pentateuch, the robe remains an elusive thing, a thing needed more than it is adorned

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Equipe di Oggi venerdì, 13 giugno 2025

[historypaintings]

Apelles Portraying Pancaspe

Artist: Sebastiano Ricci (Italian, 1659-1734)

Date: ca. 1700-1704

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: National Gallery of Parma, Parma, Italy

Description

Apelles of Kos (4th century BC) was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom much of modern scholars' knowledge of this artist is owed (Naturalis Historia 35.36.79–97 and passim), rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists. He dated Apelles to the 112th Olympiad (332–329 BC), possibly because he had produced a portrait of Alexander the Great.

Probably born at Colophon in Ionia, he first studied under Ephorus of Ephesus, but after he had attained some celebrity, he became a student of Pamphilus at Sicyon; he thus combined the Dorian thoroughness with the Ionic grace. Attracted to the court of Philip II, he painted him and the young Alexander with such success that he became the recognized court painter of Macedon.

[thelonguepuree]

I have been arguing that constructions of modern Western gay male identity tend to be, not in the first place "essentially gay," but instead (or at least also) in a very intimately responsive and expressive, though always oblique, relation to incoherences implicit in modern male heterosexuality. Much might be said, then, following this clue, about the production and deployment, especially in contemporary US society, of an extraordinarily high level of self-pity in nongay men. Its effects on our national politics, and international ideology and intervention, have been pervasive. (Snapshot, here, of the tear-welling eyes of Oliver North.) In more intimate manifestations this straight male self-pity is often currently referred to (though it appears to exceed) the cultural effects of feminism, and is associated with, or appealed to in justification of, acts of violence, especially against women. For instance, the astonishing proportion of male violence done on separated wives, ex-wives, and ex-girlfriends, women just at the threshold of establishing a separate personal space, seems sanctioned and guided as much as reflected by the flood of books and movies in which such violence seems an expression not of the macho personality but of the maudlin. (One reason women get nervous when straight men claim to have received from feminism the gift of "permission to cry.") Although compulsively illustrated for public consumption (see, on this, the New York Times's "About Men," passim, or for that matter any newspaper's sports page, or western novels, male country music, the dying-father-and-his-son stories in The New Yorker, or any other form of genre writing aimed at men), this vast national wash of masculine self-pity is essentially never named or discussed as a cultural and political fact; machismo and competitiveness, or a putative gentleness, take its place as subjects of nomination and analysis. Poised between shame and shamelessness, this regime of heterosexual male self-pity has the projective potency of an open secret. It would scarcely be surprising if gay men, like all women, were a main target of its scapegoating projections—viciously sentimental attributions of a vitiated sentimentality.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

[misscrawfords]

Philippa Somerville passim:

[tvntheatre]

Ah yes: irritating painting session (indiscernible due to inconvenient framing), and an Erik doodle; P!ATD my beloved, and that Masked thing that I hate; redesign of Passim's original design meant for some sort of retconned phase that led into the current design.

I can't decide what to refer to Robie/Passim/[placeholder for other alias] in general, I cannot call it Rob because that's the nickname of another OC I have.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

"Herodotus and the Presocratics: inquiry and intellectual culture in the fifth century BCE

K. Scarlett Kingsley, Herodotus and the Presocratics: inquiry and intellectual culture in the fifth century BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. 272. ISBN 9781009338547.

Review by

Davide Napoli, Cornell University. davidenapoli@cornell.edu

Preview

The fluidity of generic boundaries in classical Greek culture is part of what makes its study fascinatingly complex, as Scarlett Kingsley argues in her Introduction to Herodotus and the Presocratics. But the high level of specialization within modern subfields can often obscure key connections across the spectrum of classical Greek intellectual history. Some of the most thought-provoking recent contributions to this field have in fact aimed to transcend such disciplinary boundaries—a group to which Herodotus and the Presocratics should now be added.[1]

The originality of Kingsley’s contribution can be readily gauged if compared with its closest intellectual predecessor, Rosalind Thomas’ groundbreaking Herodotus in Context (2000). As Kingsley argues (pp. 6–9), the longstanding interest in Herodotus’ empiricism, of which Thomas’ work is perhaps the most compelling and influential example, has led interpreters to downplay the Histories’ interactions with theoretical inquiry (although, one might add, in some cases the dichotomy between theoretical and empirical might be in the eye of the reader). The overarching contribution of Herodotus and the Presocratics is to revise and complement this interpretative paradigm by tracing Herodotus’ relationship to the philosophical speculation associated with the so-called Presocratics. While Kingsley is explicit about the problematic status of the term “Presocratic” (30–1), her use of this category is significantly more capacious than usual, including authors like Sophocles, Antiphon, and Hippias—so much so that the line between “Presocratic” and “classical Greek” is at times hard to draw.

The connection between Herodotus and the Presocratics traced by Kingsley is particularly intriguing insofar as it focuses on the narrative of the Histories, rather than on its author’s assumed views: “the historical narrative throughout the Histories stakes out a range of philosophical views that place the reader in the hermeneutic position of vicariously testing ideas and methods in a laboratory of historical action” (9, emphasis mine). Kingsley understands the Histories as a laboratory in which contemporary concepts and conflicting theories operate, interact, and clash. The lack of a strong thesis in some of Kingsley’s chapters is thus less a flaw than a feature of this wide-ranging exploration, which puts Herodotus’ readers front and center. To anchor her argument, in most chapters Kingsley selects a particular Herodotean passage as her focal point, but the systematic work of contextualization makes her analyses much richer than isolated close readings.

The methodological section of the Introduction starts with the refreshing observation that “in spite of an awareness of its anteriority, the Histories is often interpreted in light of the generic expectations of later historiography, which only arose in its wake” (11). However, while warning against “generic essentialism” (33), Kingsley’s Introduction seems at times to fall under its spell, especially in her treatment of “generic miscegenation”: “[Herodotus’] historiē contains generic miscegenation already in the fifth century” (35). This contention presupposes the possibility of pure genres, an interpretative mirage that is even less productive in a context where generic heterogeneity is the rule rather than the exception.[2] The Introduction is more effective when tackling “generic indeterminacy” (9 and passim), but the use of genre theory à la Todorov, with its focus on (the modern construction of) literature, downplays the Histories’ cultural alterity. Consider the following example: “the Histories does not create its audience ex nihilo, it relies upon readerly competence to do the work of situating its literary ambitions in an already-existing reading culture” (19). Here, several terms domesticate the Histories by turning it into a modern work of literature: “literary ambitions��� presupposes a well-defined field of literature; “reading culture” and “readerly competence” (a term that echoes reader-response criticism’s problematic “informed readers”) gloss over the complex status of writing in the fifth century; and even an italicized title like “the Histories” can function in this context as a hallmark of modern authorship (Castelli 2020, 43–55 and 191–207). Kingsley’s adoption of genre theory to address the Histories’ generic indeterminacy makes the Introduction feel like a false start, especially because Kingsley’s insightful discussions can largely be read independently from it.

Chapter 2 (“Relativism, King of All”) demonstrates the complexity and ambiguity of nomos in the Histories. Kingsley starts from the famous comparison between the Greeks’ and the Callatians’ divergent funerary customs (Hdt. 3.38). Far from endorsing the simple relativism of nomoi, as analyses of this passage usually surmise, Kingsley argues that the Histories repeatedly complicates the value of nomos by showing how it can be weaponized. This chapter culminates in an astute analysis of the way Darius’ language in the Constitutional Debate redefines the Persian nomoi (71–2), in which Kingsley shows that in the narrative of the third book “the unjust actions of the Great King are naturalized as cultural tradition” (75).

Chapter 3 (“The Pull of Tradition: Egoism and the Persian Revolution”) discusses self-interest as a motive for human action. The centerpiece here is the episode of the False Smerdis in the third book of the Histories, which is put in conversation with tragic (esp. Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and sophistic texts. Despite the intriguing conceptual tapestry that results from this reading, Kingsley’s reconstruction of the debate around self-interest moves on a high level of generality (for instance when comparing Herodotus’ Darius and Odysseus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and feels less focused than the arguments pursued elsewhere in the book.

The opposite is true of Chapter 4 (“History peri physeos”), which is driven by a tight and clear-cut thesis, namely that the paradigm of environmental determinism is a reductive understanding of the operation of physis in the Histories. Such a challenge is not entirely new (e.g., Thomas 2000, 103–14), but Kingsley persuasively shows that physis plays a more prominent role in the economy of the Histories than usually acknowledged, directing our attention to a different set of intertextual resonances that include Anaximander (124), Aeschylus (127), and Antiphon (139). These readings show, among other things, how Kingsley’s approach can complement the dominant emphasis on the empirical dimension of the Histories.

It is however in Chapter 5 (“Physis on the Battlefield”) that the book is at its most original. Here Kingsley extends the discussion of physis to moments in which it is exceeded, which are signaled by phrases like “better/stronger than one’s physis” (ἀμείνων/κρείσσων τῆς φύσεως). Using the debate between Xerxes and Demaratus in Book 7 as the lynchpin for her analysis, Kingsley identifies a particular strand of the fifth-century discussion of physis, which she suggestively terms “transhumanism” (142, n. 5). Kingsley shows how Herodotus’ narrative tests the theoretical underpinnings of transhumanism, with a move that perturbs the simple binary logic of nomos vs. physis. This chapter showcases the payoff of a methodological framework that can easily toggle between text and context: Kingsley not only uses contemporary speculation to enrich Herodotus’ text but also lets the peculiar emphases of the Histories shine a new light on fifth-century theoretical debates.

Chapter 6 (“Historical Inquiry and Presocratic Epistemology”) turns to the epistemological assumptions that underpin the narrator’s voice in the Histories. This is a rich field of exploration, as it draws extensively on the Presocratic debates on truth and being (to on). In a very successful section, Kingsley argues that Herodotus engages with Presocratic epistemology through a marked use of a “grammar of truth” (179–86), in particular by “domesticating the participle τὸ ἐόν as a referent applicable to the past” (189). This example is representative of the close and fruitful attention paid to verbal patterns throughout this chapter.

The seventh and final chapter (“Herodotean Philosophy”) reads differently from the previous ones, as it zooms in on a single text as an example of Herodotean reception—the Dissoi Logoi (which Kingsley, following the majority opinion, dates to the early fourth century). A large part of the discussion is dedicated to cultural relativism, a topic treated in Chapter 2, thus creating a ring-composition in the book’s argument. A brief comparison between the experience that Empedocles’ sophos acquires in multiple lives (DK 31 B 129) and the one that Herodotus gathers from the historical past provides a suggestive conclusion (205–6). Three appendices round off the book by expanding upon Kingsley’s treatment of relativism and epistemology.

As this brief summary suggests, one of the features that makes Kingsley’s book stand out is the breadth of the textual evidence brought to bear on the Histories. Not only does Kingsley deftly move across the spectrum of fifth-century culture, but she also often keeps an eye on its later reception (e.g., p. 108 on Athenaeus; pp. 201–2 on Maximus of Tyre). Equally commendable is Kingsley’s extensive engagement with prior scholars in multiple languages (in some places even too extensive, where it arrests the flow of the argument: pp. 190–4). These aspects show that Kingsley’s inquiry is, like Herodotus’ historiē, in constant and productive dialogue with its intellectual predecessors—and contemporaries.

A lot of the interpretative work done by Herodotus and the Presocratics is a balancing act that thoughtfully complicates engrained ideas (e.g., Herodotus’ privileging of nomos over physis: 121–38; Herodotus’ aversion to truth-claims: 179–86). While Kingsley is not alone in challenging or nuancing these interpretative paradigms in Herodotean scholarship, her work brings this debate to a broader audience by making epistemological curiosity a key feature of Herodotus’ intellectual profile. Kingsley’s Herodotus is less a systematic theorist than—in keeping with the Histories-as-laboratory—a bold experimenter, whose profound interest in alternative explanations prevents him from committing to a single theoretical stance.

The reach of Kingsley’s discussion is sometimes stymied by a tendency to make individual examples stand in for categories, as when Antiphon represents “Presocratic circles” (62 n. 83) or a μέν…δέ antithesis represents “sophistic style” (96). This can lead to overgeneralizations like the following: “what [Hippias’ work] indicates is that the universalizing tendencies of early Greek philosophy could and did include the study of the past in its project” (23). This sentence is built on a series of debatable assumptions: that “early Greek philosophy” is a unity, that it has a project, that Hippias’ work is part of it, and that it can in fact stand in for it.

Such criticisms, perhaps inevitable for a project of this interdisciplinary breadth, do not detract from the most important contribution of this book: the invitation to contemplate an alternative intellectual geography for Herodotus’ Histories, which firmly establishes its vital role in contemporary theoretical debates. Kingsley’s insightful analysis of the Histories’ laboratory makes Herodotus and the Presocratics a must-read for Herodotean scholars, as well as for anyone interested in classical Greek intellectual history.[3]

References

Billings, J. 2021. The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens. Princeton.

Castelli, E. 2020. La nascita del titolo nella letteratura greca: dall’epica arcaica alla prosa di età classica. Berlin.

Foster, M., L. Kurke, and N. Weiss. 2019. Introduction. In Genre in archaic and classical Greek poetry: theories and models, ed. Margaret Foster, Leslie Kurke and Naomi Weiss, 1-28. Leiden.

Grethlein, J. 2010. The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge.

Holmes, B. 2010. The Symptom and the Subject: the Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton.

Kurke, L. 2011. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Princeton.

Nightingale, A. W. 1995. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge.

Proietti, G. 2021. Prima di Erodoto: aspetti della memoria delle Guerre persiane. Stuttgart.

Thomas, R. 2000. Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion. Cambridge.

Notes

[1] E.g., Billings 2021; Kurke 2011; Holmes 2010.

[2] E.g., Grethlein 2010, 149–204; Nightingale 1995; Foster, Kurke and Weiss 2019.

[3] A minor desideratum: it might have been interesting to see Kingsley engage with Giorgia Proietti’s landmark Prima di Erodoto (2021). The vastly different backgrounds in which they place Herodotus’ work (civic memory for Proietti, intellectual inquiry for Kingsley), as well as Proietti’s extensive use of material culture, might together yield an even richer image of the fifth-century context to which the Histories respond."

Source:

[transtheology]

In the NRSV translation, Genesis 37:3 says, “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves.” The NIV translation describes Joseph’s garment as “an ornate robe,” and the NET translation calls it “a special tunic.” Why so many different translations?

Well, it turns out that one of the ways we understand the vocabulary of the Bible is by looking at where that same vocabulary is used in other passages, and the Hebrew words ketonet passim, which describe Joseph’s garment, are only used in one other place in the whole Bible. That place is 2 Samuel 13:18 which says, “Now [Tamar] was wearing a ketonet passim; for this is how the virgin daughters of the king were clothed in earlier times.”

So what do we make of the fact that this piece of clothing is worn once by Joseph, and then specifically described as a dress for princesses? We’re left to draw our own conclusions!

— What does the Bible say about gendered clothing? (Deuteronomy 22:5) on queergrace.com