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.

[myjetpack]

My latest New Scientist cartoon

[herpsandbirds]

Fiery-throated Hummingbird (Panterpe insignis), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, Panama

photograph by Ignacio Yúfera 

[lionofchaeronea]

Reading the novel Fear by Gabriel Chevallier. Chevallier served in WWI as an infantryman, was wounded, returned to the front, and won the Croix de Guerre. He sat down in 1925 to write a fictionalized account of his experiences but didn't publish it until 1930. Fear is brilliant and ruthless: Chevallier describes in unsparing detail the nightmare of trench warfare, the tedium of camp life in between battles, and the stupidity of the French high command. (When his avatar Jean Dartremont explains why he was passed over for officer school, you won't know whether to laugh or weep.) A true masterpiece.

(Incidentally: this is the third novel about WWI I've read this year, following A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front. Don't ask me how I got onto this topic--I'm not quite sure myself--but it's been illuminating.)

[lionofchaeronea]

I've been working with light weights to build muscle tone and decrease stiffness in the joints. It's early days yet, but the results so far are promising. I've also gotten back to working my abdominal muscles after a long (very long) interval. My abs have seen fit to remind me forcefully that I've neglected them, which is only fair. The goal here is to develop much-needed core strength so that I'll be physically ready to try something more strenuous, such as martial arts, down the road.

[lionofchaeronea]

Just finished The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin. Originally published in 1983, it was the first novel by Sorokin, who today is considered one of Russia's best -- and most controversial -- living authors. (He's a ferocious critic of Putin and has been living in exile in Berlin since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.) The plot is simple: on an ordinary day in Moscow, thousands of people have formed a queue to purchase imported goods. (What those goods actually are isn't clear.) As they make next to no progress in the queue, we follow their conversations through dialogue alone -- no descriptive passages, no stage directions, not even speaker attributions. Pauses -- brief ones for eating, longer ones for sleep -- are indicated by white space.

It's a conceit that could easily wear thin, and at times it does. Particularly frustrating are the two-handed conversations in which you can easily get lost figuring out who's saying what. But at his best, Sorokin is positively virtuosic. Perhaps his finest tour de force is a lengthy passage in which a woman reads off the surnames of people in the queue -- dozens and dozens of surnames, some real, some invented -- in what reads like a parodic twist on the Homeric Catalogue of Ships.

I won't give away the resolution, except to say that it's surprisingly happy for the time and place in which it's set. Overall, whether as a surreal, Kafkaesque tale or a window on the creaking USSR of the early Eighties, the book works, and I enjoyed it.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Fountain of the Three Lions, Assisi Artist: Harriet Mary Ford (Canadian, 1859-1938) Date: 1909 Genre: veduta Medium: watercolor Location: private collection

Harriet Mary Ford, from Brockville, Ontario, was an expert on Renaissance art, in addition to her activities as a painter and maker of jewelry. A highly accomplished muralist (though many of her works in that medium are now lost), she founded the Society of Mural Decorators in 1894.

[lionofchaeronea]

Still working toward my reading goal of 100 books for 2026. I just hit 90.

[lionofchaeronea]

Thinking about taking tomorrow as a sick day from work. I'm not actually sick, but I'm so tired I can barely see straight.

[sodom-hussein]

Rb if you want your mutuals to alert you if you accidentally reblog AI generated images

[lionofchaeronea]

Argenteus (diameter=18 mm; weight=3.33 g), minted ca. 295-297 CE by the Roman emperor Galerius during his period as Caesar under Diocletian. As Diocletian's second-in-command and heir presumptive, Galerius waged war on multiple fronts; perhaps his greatest military achievement was a crushing victory over the Persian king Narses that led to a decades-long peace between the two great empires. However, thanks to Christian writers such as Lactantius and Eusebius, Galerius has gone down in history chiefly as a zealous persecutor of Christians who sought to restore traditional Roman religion at any cost.

On the obverse of this coin is a laureate bust of Galerius. He is identified as "Maximianus Caesar" because he changed his cognomen Maximinus to Maximianus upon being made Caesar, in a gesture of respect to Diocletian's co-Augustus Maximian. (Confused yet?) The portrait of Galerius is very similar to those of the other Tetrarchs on coins and in sculpture, reflecting both a tendency toward idealization in late antique art and Diocletian's ideology of uniformity among the four co-rulers.

On the reverse, fittingly, are four figures in military garb: they have been variously identified as the Tetrarchs themselves or as soldiers representing them, although given the co-rulers' constant wars, for them to be shown as soldiers would not have been surprising. The figures are shown sacrificing over a tripod before a six-turreted representation of a city.

The surrounding inscription reads VICTORIA SARMAT, evoking a Roman victory over the Sarmatians (Sarmatae). Of Iranian origin, the Sarmatians were a nomadic people known and feared for their heavy cavalry. By the end of the third century CE their military power was in decline, as they were pressed against the Danube frontier by the emergent power of the Huns. While the Romans often clashed with and defeated the Sarmatians, they regarded the tribe as a useful buffer against the Huns and other, stronger peoples, and indeed many Sarmatians were taken on as auxiliaries in the Roman army.

Photo credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com | Wikimedia Commons | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

[herpsandbirds]

Indian Courser (Cursorius coromandelicus), parents and chick, family Glareolidae, order Charadriiformes, Bhigwan Grasslands, Maharashtra, India

photograph by Shiva Kumar

[lionofchaeronea]

My new bookcase buddy.

[herpsandbirds]

Fire Skink (Mochlus fernandi), family Scincidae, Equatorial Guinea

Photograph by trekking with javi

[lionofchaeronea]

I've been working for some time on a program of isometric exercises designed to build strength, and so far it's been promising. My hand and forearm strength, in particular, is much greater than it was before I began. I've also strengthened my calves, which has had a salutary effect on my balance: I can stand on one leg, either left or right, for much longer than I could before.

I continue to be thick around the middle (as the saying goes), and honestly, that's unlikely to change soon. I'm not terribly bothered, though. As I've noted before, my focus is less "lose weight" than "gain muscle".

As to why I'm focusing on hand and forearm strength in particular: I can't quite believe I'm saying this at age 44, but I'm dipping my toes back into the water of martial arts. I studied karate as a child but gave it up after growing sick of my drill-sergeant-esque instructor. Ever since, I've wondered whether I made the right decision. Now, inspired by my father, who's taken up tai chi, I'm conditioning myself to study kung fu -- not so much because I'm hankering to get into brawls (at my age that would be deeply ill-advised), but because I want to achieve self-control and self-mastery. (Also, kung fu is just so beautiful.)

Thanks for listening to today's ramble. Updates will follow from time to time.

[unhelpfultarot]

Eight of Cups and The Star

You'd like to get away from all the tired familiar horrors, and splash in a lovely unspoiled lake under a clear evening sky.

[rival2lover]

let's all care. Forever

[lionofchaeronea]

Noda River in Mitsu (from the series The Six Crystal Rivers Newly Fashioned), Kitagawa Utamaro, ca. 1804