The Lion of Chaeronea

A blog dedicated to classical antiquity, poetry, and the visual arts. All translations of Greek and Latin are my own unless otherwise noted.

[lionofchaeronea]

I'm going to take some time in the coming months and learn as much as I feasibly can about botany. Why? No compelling reason, other than that I a) love plants and b) don't know anywhere near as much as I ought to about them.

[thelostcanyon]

Mesquite Creek Canyon, Superstition Mountains, Maricopa County, Arizona.

[lionofchaeronea]

Every so often I like to read something that's completely outside my competence zone -- after all, it's the best way to learn something new. With this in mind, I'm reading The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page, originally published in 1962 and brought back into print in 2007 by NYRB Classics. Page (1906-1985) was a world-class garden designer with a career spanning nearly six decades, and in this book, he embarks on a sort of mental tour of the gardens that struck him as particularly lovely and/or well-adapted to their settings. It's beautifully written, with an astonishing eye for detail (Page originally trained as a painter), and above all, it's relaxed -- a word I mean as high praise. So much of life now revolves around a deluge of information, with sensory assaults ever increasing and attention spans ever shortening. To indulge in a book like this one, whose pace is set solely by the rhythms of the natural world, makes for an escape of the very best kind.

[lovecrumbss]

James Baldwin talking about love

[unhelpfultarot]

The World and Nine of Pentacles

Some days you want to dance naked in the open air with your friends, and some days you'd rather wear a comfortable slouchy robe in your own yard, so you're glad both options exist.

[lionofchaeronea]

Exciting news for mystery fans! In the wake of the recent "Young Sherlock" and "Young Poirot" reboots, Britain's ITV has commissioned Young Marple, starring Sydney Sweeney in the title role.

From the official press release:

"Long before St. Mary Mead, Jane Marple was a dancer in the seedy music halls of London's East End. In this series, she'll solve six fanservice-laden mysteries, while growing into the elderly spinster we know and (mostly) love."

ITV Head of Programming Fred Blythewaite is enthusiastic about the project. "I have no doubt that it will be our channel's finest hour," he said, adding "If not, we'll just dump it on Netflix".

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775-1851) Date: 1827 Genre: seascape Movement: Romanticism Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 32.1 cm (12.6 in) high x 50.2 cm (19.7 in) wide Location: Tate Britain, London, England, UK

This work, which reflects Turner's lifelong interest in the sea, was completed during July-August 1827, when the artist was staying at East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight. Art historians speculate that he may have done some of his preparatory sketches on board a man-of-war anchored at Cowes Roads.

[lionofchaeronea]

So, I'm signed up to do a "poetry marathon" tomorrow -- 24 poems in a 24-hour window. It's unlikely I'll succeed, given that I have dinner out with my folks in the evening, but I'm OK with that. My chief goal is to get enough halfway decent raw material out of the exercise to put together a chapbook. (Also, if I get stuck for ideas and need to procrastinate, I'll have an excuse to do some much-needed cleaning around the place.)

[lionofchaeronea]

Sometimes I do miss living within walking distance of a good academic library. I know this isn't a terribly significant problem to have in the grand scheme of things, but it would still be nice to be able to pop over and do some hard-core research whenever I feel like it.

[unhelpfultarot]

Five of Pentacles and Seven of Pentacles

Soon you should take a short break from the grind, to stop and admire your progress.

[lionofchaeronea]

I am so fucking sick of racist thugs, and of the rabble-rousers who deliberately stir up racist thugs for their own political ends. Damn them all to hell.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: St. Christopher Artist: Orazio Borgianni (Italian [Roman], 1574-1616) Date: end of the 16th or beginning of the 17th century (between 1605 and 1616?) Genre: religious art (Roman Catholic Christianity) Movement: Mannerism Period: Early Baroque Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 165 cm (64.9 in) high x 120.5 cm (47.4 in) wide Location: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

In this large painting, St. Christopher, whose image is today used as protection by travelers, bears the infant Christ on his back as he fords a river. This story first appears in the Aurea Legenda (Golden Legend), an enormously popular book of stories about the saints compiled by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century. The palm leaves at the end of Christopher's staff refer to his martyrdom, which is variously dated to the reigns of Trajan Decius, Diocletian, or Maximinus Daza.

Orazio Borgianni, born and trained in Rome, spent some years in Spain under the patronage of Philip II, where he produced the majority of his mature work. His style combines the dramatic poses of Mannerism, early Baroque tendencies found in contemporaries like Annibale Carracci, and an interest in light and shadow drawn from Caravaggio (with whom, according to Borgianni's biographer Giovanni Baglione, Borgianni once quarreled violently, hurling a bottle of varnish at his head).

[lionofchaeronea]

Current nonfiction reading is The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy by Victoria Wohl (Univ. of California Press, 2025). It's the published version of the 78th Sather Classical Lectures that Wohl delivered at Cal-Berkeley (her alma mater, as it happens).

Wohl's central claim, which she expresses in clear, elegant prose, is that it's futile to attempt to separate the "philosophical" content of the Presocratics from their "poetic" mode of expression, because it's precisely the latter that gives shape and meaning to the former. Drawing on literary-critical theories of poetry as a generator of multiple, often contradictory, meanings, she analyzes five of the Presocratics -- Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus -- who wrote either in verse or highly charged prose. In each author, she finds that "the medium is the message": the ties between their thought and their language are inextricable and must be explored if their way of "doing philosophy" is to be properly understood.

This may not seem like a particularly controversial argument, at least for someone approaching matters from the literary side -- Wohl has also written with great accomplishment on Euripides -- but as she notes, the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy has meant that even the most perceptive students of the Presocratics are hesitant to read them in such a lit-crit manner. Their assumption, following Aristotle in the Metaphysics, is that poetic language, however interesting in its own right, is ultimately a veil that conceals the "true," supralinguistic content that properly defines philosophy. Wohl, on the other hand, is more in sympathy with the continental tradition of philosophy, which (at its best) reads literature and philosophy as two sides of the same coin.

It's a really thoughtful monograph, one that's leading me to think about the Presocratics in an altogether new way. As an added bonus, a free electronic copy of the book is available through UC Press's open access program, Luminos. (Of course, Luddite that I am, I bought a physical copy.)

[lionofchaeronea]

Now that the BBC is at a loss about how to proceed with Doctor Who, I've decided to shoot my shot and offer to play the next Doctor. No, I'm not British, but I...

a) am available; b) work cheap; c) can fake a decent Scottish accent; and d) will happily shout "DAAAAAAAVROOOOOOOOOS!" in a manner so hammy that Colin Baker will beg me to show some restraint, for God's sake.

C'mon, Beeb. What have you got to lose?

[lionofchaeronea]

The kid sitting in front of me on this flight is watching Paw Patrol: The Movie. I'm not familiar with Paw Patrol, and I'm surely missing some nuance by not being able to hear the dialogue, but as far as I can tell, it takes place in some sort of anarcho-capitalist dystopia where politicians are irredeemably corrupt, building codes do not exist, public services have been abolished, and everyone would have died long ago if not for a group of talking dogs and a ten-year-old on a quad bike. Talk about dark. And they show this stuff to kids?

[lionofchaeronea]

I'm not a big soccer fan -- I'm not a big sports fan, honestly -- but I'm going to make a good-faith effort to follow this year's World Cup. I feel a bit silly being unacquainted with the sport favored by 90% of the globe. Plus, it'll give me a chance to root for multiple teams I like -- those that are good (Mexico, Brazil) and those that are...less good (hi there, Scotland!)

[lionofchaeronea]

Meet Alasdair, the Beargpiper.