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.

[yesornopolls]

Do you read particularly fast?

Do you read particularly fast?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 6 days 19 hours

[lionofchaeronea]

I'm no speed-reader, and I have friends who far outpace me, but I did read 164 books last year.

[lionofchaeronea]

I really need to get my blood pressure down, or sooner or later I'm going to have a stroke.

[chamomile-teabag]

WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me

[goneahead]

Pearl of the Desert - stellar book if you are interested in Palmyra♥️

[lionofchaeronea]

The Collected Verse of Paul Valéry (Oxford World's Classics, bilingual edition). A very fine book, although the translator makes some choices I do not agree with (e.g. in Valéry's early poem "The White Cats," he renders jaloux as "envious," when in context it clearly means "jealously guarding").

[chanth-thara]

okay, i’m curious. let’s play a game. reblog this post and put in the tags the name of a fictional Indigenous character.

No headcanons, no ‘coding’, only CANONICALLY Indigenous characters. You have unlimited time. Go.

[chanth-thara]

if another FUCKING person mentions the fucking werewolves from twilight I'm going to burn this whole site down and take you all with me

[goneahead]

@chanth-thara fictional indigenous character? Cú Chulainn😁

[lionofchaeronea]

I'll vote for the unnamed Blackfoot/Gros Ventre narrator of James Welch's superb novel Winter in the Blood.

[chiimeramanticore]

do me a favor and reblog this and put in the tags what time it is for you and what you're currently doing/thinking about

[lionofchaeronea]

I just wanted to say that I adore your poetry. The first time I read one of your ones about greek myth I thought it was an actual ancient poem, sometimes I still have to remind myself they aren't - I think you would have been very popular back then!

Thank you! That's really sweet of you. I appreciate it.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Alright tell me in the tags, what’s Your Poem? That poem you heard once and it has dwelt within you ever since?

[lionofchaeronea]

From "September 1, 1939" by W.H. Auden:

There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police: We must love one another or die.

[lionofchaeronea]

For the ask gane: 🎧, 🎬, 🚫

A song that's been driving you up the wall recently: not really a song, properly speaking, but the jingle for Safelite, a windshield repair company: "Safelite repair, Safelite replace!" It's lodged in my head and won't come loose.

Worst film you've seen lately: The Night the World Exploded (1957). I should say, in the interest of honesty, that I enjoyed it -- I'm a bad movie aficionado -- but it really was pretty awful, thanks largely to the tiny budget. Much of the movie is set in what purports to be Carlsbad Caverns, and whatever the fake stalactites were made of, they jiggle when the actors brush against them.

If you could eliminate one thing from the world--as if it never existed--what would it be? Racial bigotry. It's killing us all. And I'm not speaking metaphorically.

[lionofchaeronea]

👸?

A historical figure you have a personal beef with: I've mentioned Alexander the Great, so I'll name another, much more recent figure: Robert E. Lee. Why do I have a beef with him? Because so many (white) people in the American South -- including, I regret to say, certain members of my own extended family -- look up to him as some sort of great hero, fighting in a doomed but morally superior cause. The reality is that like every other prominent Confederate, the man committed treason against his country to fight on behalf of white supremacy and chattel slavery. I fail to see how that merits adulation.

[herpsandbirds]

Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus), male, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes, northern India

Photograph by Jayeeta Chowdhury 

[lionofchaeronea]

I posted this in a group as well, but if anyone wants to see the massive chaos that is my life, here are two of my three bookshelves. First picture = my Penguin Classics and some of my Loeb Classical Library volumes. Second picture = my Oxford World's Classics (top shelf) and the many, many poetry collections/anthologies I've acquired over the years (remaining shelves).

[lionofchaeronea]

I think I need to go do something else for a while. I really do.

[lionofchaeronea]

🗺️? You talk about traveling enough to have some place you’ve hated 👀

All of the places I've been to overseas I've either liked or loved (although Naples took some getting used to, seeing as I was there during a garbage strike), but there's one place within the United States that I will never visit again if I can help it: College Station, Texas, home to Texas A&M University (and nothing else). If you've ever wondered "What would it be like to set foot in 1936 Nuremberg?", that town will give you an answer.

[lionofchaeronea]

Eeeeeeeeh. Academia is obsessed with Genghis Khan and I doubt it's because they think Mongolia is the root of western civilization. There's even a sort of borderline admiration about how much you might be related to him due to all his rapes.

True enough.

[cyberxbattalion]

[lionofchaeronea]

it's so funny to me that you needed to clarify that Agamemnon is a horrible person as if that's not been the popular take since 800BCE

Quod scripsi, scripsi.

[please-be-nice-im-sensitivee]

im going to find out the #1 favorite character of Greek myth on this site

If you can please reblog with your favorite I’ll make a list and create a side blog to post the polls

[lionofchaeronea]

Clytemnestra. I've always found her fascinating. (Much more so than her husband, who, like so many leaders through the millennia, was a pompous blowhard undeserving of the status he claimed.)