alexander's great ass

(now in Tokat Province, Turkey, and known as Zile), after achieving victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela. The phrase is used to refer to a swift, conclusive victory. Pauline, xvi. history doesn't have to be boring.

[historicaltimes]

An East German guard passes a flower through a gap in the Berlin wall on the morning it was torn down. November 10th 1989.

via reddit

[patroclux-deactivated20260128]

Athena, the goddess of war, wisdom, and crafts.

[historyfilia-deactivated2025061]

Character of the week: The great Homer

Homer was a greek poet. He lived around the eight century before Christ, possibily, in a city called Snyrma. But, actually, we do not even if he really existed! 

We only have two books, the Iliad and the Odessey, two fantastic epic poems, the first one written by a person of the Western Civilization. Yes, they constitute the oldest Europena literature, so they are the basis and the inspiration for the rest of writers, even currently. Homer’s importance is transcendental for Western Culture.

On the other hand, his characters from both poems are an accurate reflection of life in Greece during the Mycenaean Period. We can not be sure that they existed, nor the facts described by Homer actually ocurred. But a lot of information can be extracted from the books. 

Regarding Homer’s existence, the few of proofs about it reduce to the attestation of later writers, like the satirist Lucian. He is thought to be blind, because of he name: Homeros could mean the one who do not see. However, currently there are many other theories about Homer: maybe he was a she, or he was a group of writers.

Well, now it’s time you to tell me something about him: do you think Homer was real?

[mostlytired]

Vincent Van Gogh

A Vase of Roses (1890)

[hannigraham]

History Meme: 1/1 War

The Trojan War

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably through Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad relates a part of the last year of the siege of Troy; the Odyssey describes Odysseus’s journey home. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.

The war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, after Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked “for the fairest”. Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the “fairest”, should receive the apple. In exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the brother of Helen’s husband Menelaus, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years because of Paris’ insult. After the deaths of many heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse. The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans (except for some of the women and children whom they kept or sold as slaves) and desecrated the temples, thus earning the gods’ wrath. Few of the Achaeans returned safely to their homes and many founded colonies in distant shores. The Romans later traced their origin to Aeneas, one of the Trojans, who was said to have led the surviving Trojans to modern-day Italy.

The ancient Greeks thought that the Trojan War was a historical event that had taken place in the 13th or 12th century BC, and believed that Troy was located in modern-day Turkey near the Dardanelles. By modern times, both the war and the city were widely believed to be non-historical. In 1868, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was at Hissarlik and Schliemann took over Calvert’s excavations on property belonging to Calvert; this claim is now accepted by most scholars. Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War is an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th centuries BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VIIa.

[argonauticae]

A L E X A N D E R   T H E   G R E A T (for ilvalentinos)

‘how may a man become a god?' 

'by doing something a man cannot do.’

[chroniqa]

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

Alexander the Great

[magic-of-eternity]

Theatinerkirche St. kajetan, Munich

[sayburgundy]

history meme - one war (1/1)

The Cold War (1947-1981) was a sustained period of conflict, primarily between the USSR and the USA. Spurred on by continuing tensions from the end of WWII, The Cold War was a clash of ideologies - communism (Soviet Russia) vs. capitalism (America), with each side vying for dominance in a bitter power struggle. The term ‘Cold War’ comes not from Russia’s climate, but instead refers to the lack of actual army-to-army warfare taking place. Instead, both counties fought for their beliefs through technological advances such as the space and arms races, while their client states fought in proxy wars - e.g. Vietnam and Korea.

What may have eventually ensured that The Cold War didn’t become ‘hot’ was the impending threat of nuclear warfare. Both the USSR and the USA had frantically stockpiled as many nuclear weapons as possible in the struggle to be the superior military force, but the threat atom bombs posed was not so well known until 1952, when America exploded the H-Bomb; 2500 times more powerful than that dropped in Hiroshima. Russia followed suit, possessing their own H-Bomb by the following year. Suddenly, the world was a much more dangerous place. Both nations knew that if they were to fire their missiles, the enemy would respond immediately; resulting in wide-spread mass destruction for them both. As Soviet leader Nikita Chrushev said: “The survivors of a nuclear war would envy the dead.” [+more]