For #MosaicMonday
#AncientBlueSky
This white on black pebble mosaic from an andron in a private house shows Dionysos on a chariot drawn by two panthers and in a flowing chiton or chlamys led on by a naked male surrounded on all sides by a train of swirling, dancing maenads, some pulling small deer

a translation of sulpicia 1

my beautiful appian thank you for being here. tacitus tace challenge. florus you're unexpected but im never sad to see you

has anyone ever thought of cicerlina

when i use the word "like" in a sentence, i use it in the same way cicero used "enim" pre-punctuation to delineate new sentences. this is a conscious classicising writing choice, and it's on purpose and not because i got in the habit of stalling on my word choice

the fasti is so beatiful because ovid crafts a narrator who wholly believes what he is saying and that same narrator strongly implies that ovid is lying to you. and i love it when ovid lies to me

im always thinking about transfem aeneas. its supported by the text, even, if you're englightened enough to see it

we should start splitting infinitives in latin

"my favourite part of the trojan women is hecuba’s characterisation. she tells andromache in one scene “don’t end it, submit to slavery and do what you need to survive.” in the very next scene she tells helen that a real woman would do so once separated from her husband."

my favourite part of the trojan women is hecuba’s characterisation. she tells andromache in one scene “don’t kill yourself, submit to slavery and do what you need to survive.” in the very next scene she tells helen that a real woman would kill herself once separated from her husband.

aeneid book 2:

priam: achilles would be ashamed of you

pyrrhus: well you can tell him that in hell. Die

#ancientbluesky

A #Roman mosaic underwater at Baiae. It once decorated a luxury villa in this town - a playground for Rome's elite, especially during the summer - but which is now submerged below metres of water due to geomorphic change on the coast (📷 Antonio Busiello) #Archaeology #RomanArchaeology AncientBlueSky

saw the httyd remake. it was decent but i have a gripe with the ending, which is that toothless encourages hiccup to walk on his own with the prosthesis. just as toothless cannot fly without hiccup, hiccup should not walk without toothless. otherwise they're unbalanced.

neither aeneas nor iulus are real people by the time they get to italy. iulus gets whammied literally book 1 where he's replaced with cupid and then aeneas comes out of the gate of ivory book 6. rome was founded by ghosts mirages and false desires

thinking about juno and the role of elegiac puella and the relative power which each of these have, especially juno's speech about semele in met 3, and the depictions of puellae cheating (cat 11, 58) or being violent (prop 1.3, 3.8)

thinking about carthage and the time loop

carthage is the land of the lotus eaters (lulls aeneas into wanting to stay) and the cyclopes (the idyllic perfect bay they find themselves in, the cave where a "monster" traps them) and ismarus (a city which they sack because of the time loop) etc. etc. you understand

unable as i am to translate ovid, i present instead the first of sulpicia's poems