Icarus
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings nor the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored; this tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaëthon. Icarus /IK-uh-russ/, Ikaros Ἴκαρος Greek: ‘mallet, chopper’. Compare with ἴκαρ ’at a strike, immediately’ and ἴκρια ‘wooden partition, compartment. Daedalus /DED-uh-luss/, /DEED-uh-luss/, Δαίδαλος anciently /DIGH-dah-lohs/, ‘art, craft, profession’. Icarus's father Daedalus, a talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared into the sky, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which due to the heat melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, so Icarus fell into the sea and drowned in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos. Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was by boat, provided by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip Minos' pursuing galleys, that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned. Heracles erected a tomb for him. Icarus' flight was alluded to by Greek poets in passing, but the story was told in Pseudo-Apollodorus.
In the literature of ancient Rome, the myth was of interest to Augustan writers. Hyginus narrates it in Fabula 40, beginning with the bovine love affair of Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur. Ovid narrates the story of Icarus at some length in the Metamorphoses, refers to it elsewhere. Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth and its connection with that of Phaëthon influenced the mythological tradition in English literature as received and interpreted by major writers including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Joyce. In Renaissance iconography, the significance of Icarus depends on context: in the Orion Fountain at Messina, he is one of many figures associated with water; the 16th-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally but erroneously attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was the inspiration for two of the 20th century's most notable ecphrastic English-language poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.
Other English language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton, "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish, "Mrs Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" by Hiromi Yoshida. Literary interpretation has found in the myth the structure and consequence of personal over-ambition. An Icarus-related study of the Daedalus myth was published by the French hellenist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux. In psychology there have been synthetic studies of the Icarus complex with respect to the alleged relationship between fascination for fire, high ambition, ascensionism. In the psychiatric mind features of disease were perceived in the shape of the pendulous emotional ecstatic-high and depressive-low of bipolar disorder. Henry Murray having proposed the term Icarus complex found symptoms in mania where a person is fond of heights, fascinated by both fire and water and observed with fantastical or far-fetched imaginary cognition.
Seth Godin's 2012 The Icarus Deception points to the historical change in how Western culture both propagated and interpreted the Icarus myth arguing that "we tend to forget that Icarus was warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is more dangerous than flying too high, because it feels deceptively safe." Icarus imagery in contemporary music Kua Fu, a Chinese myth about a giant who chased the sun and died while getting too close Bladud, a legendary king of the Britons, purported to have met his death when his constructed wings failed Etana, a sort of "Babylonian Icarus" Sampati, an Indian myth about a bird which lost its wings while trying to save its younger brother from the sun Graves, Robert, 1960. The Greek Myths, section 92 passim Smith, Willi
Argonautica
The Argonautica is a Greek epic poem written by Apollonius Rhodius in the 3rd century BC. The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from remote Colchis, their heroic adventures and Jason's relationship with the dangerous Colchian princess/sorceress Medea were well known to Hellenistic audiences, which enabled Apollonius to go beyond a simple narrative, giving it a scholarly emphasis suitable to the times. It was the age of the great Library of Alexandria, his epic incorporates his researches in geography, comparative religion, Homeric literature. However, his main contribution to the epic tradition lies in his development of the love between hero and heroine – he seems to have been the first narrative poet to study "the pathology of love", his Argonautica had a profound impact on Latin poetry: it was translated by Varro Atacinus and imitated by Valerius Flaccus. The Argonautica was an adventure for the poet, one of the major scholars of the Alexandrian period – it was a bold experiment in re-writing Homeric epic in a way that would meet the demanding tastes of his contemporaries.
According to some accounts, a hostile reception led to his exile to Rhodes. The literary fashion was for small, meticulous poems, featuring displays of erudition and paradoxography, as represented by the work of Callimachus. In adapting the epic genre to this audience, Apollonius went a long way towards inventing the romance novel, including narrative techniques like the "interior monologue", whereby the author identifies with a character's thoughts and feelings; the re-evaluation of his work in recent times has led to a mass of innovative studies jostling each other for attention, so that Argonautica has become a daunting adventure for many modern scholars too: Scholars that row against this current feel as if they are sailing through the Clashing Rocks. If the attempt to pass through the clashing mountain of books succeeds, there is no hope of a pause and scholars find themselves in the grip of a debilitating Ancient Greek: ἀμηχανία. Since scholarship is a key feature of this unique story, here is a preview of some of the main issues in the poet's treatment of the Argonaut myth, as addressed by recent scholarship.
A "Callimachian epic"? Callimachus set the standards for Hellenistic aesthetics in poetry and, according to ancient sources, he engaged in a bitter literary feud with Apollonius. Modern scholars dismiss these sources as unreliable and point to similarities in the poetry of the two men. Callimachus, for example, composed a book of verses dealing with aitia, the mythical origins of contemporary phenomena. According to one survey, there are eighty aitia in Argonautica, yet Argonautica is intended to be fundamentally Homeric and therefore seems at odds with the fashionable poetics of Callimachus. The epic hero? Addressing the issue of heroism in Argonautica, the German classicist H. Fränkel once noted some unheroic characteristics of Jason and his crew. In particular, their frequent moods of despair and depression, summed up in the word helplessness. By contrast, the bullying Argonaut Idas seemed to Fränkel an ugly example of the archaic warrior, it looks as if Apollonius meant to underscore the obsolescence of traditional heroism in the Hellenistic period.
These arguments have caused much discussion among scholars about the treatment and nature of heroism in Argonautica. Characters without character? Another fruitful discussion gained impetus from an article by D. A. Van Krevelen, who dismissed all the characters, apart from Medea, as flimsy extras without any interesting qualities. An "episodic epic?" In addition to aitia, Argonautica incorporates descriptions of wonders and marvels, digressions associated with Hellenistic "science", including geography, ethnography and comparative religion. So the question arises: is the poem a unified narrative, or is the epic plot a coathanger for erudite and colourful episodes? There is some dispute about the date when the poem was published, it could have been during the reign of a generation later. According to Jackie Murray, the poem was published at the time of Ptolemy III Euergetes. Apollonius' Argonautica was based on multiple ancient sources, including Pindar; the story of the expedition seems to have been known to the author of the Odyssey, who states, that the ship Argo was the only one that passed between the whirling rocks.
Jason is mentioned several times in the Iliad, but not as the leader of the Argonauts. Hesiod relates the story of Jason saying that he fetched Medeia at the command of his uncle Pelias, that she bore him a son, educated by Cheiron; the first trace of the common tradition that Jason was sent to fetch the golden fleece from Aea, the city of Aeetes, in the eastern boundaries of the earth, occurs in Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon.
National Archaeological Museum, Naples
The National Archaeological Museum of Naples is an important Italian archaeological museum for ancient Roman remains. Its collection includes works from Greek and Renaissance times, Roman artifacts from nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, it was the Real Museo Borbonico. The building was built as a cavalry barracks in 1585. From 1616 to 1777 it was the seat of the University of Naples. During the 19th century, after it became museum, it suffered many changes to the main structure; the museum hosts extensive collections of Roman antiquities. Their core is from the Farnese Collection, which includes a collection of engraved gems and the Farnese Marbles. Among the notable works found in the museum are the Herculaneum papyri, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, found after 1752 in Villa of the Papyri; the greater part of the museum's classical sculpture collection comes from the Farnese Marbles, important since they include Roman copies of classical Greek sculpture, which are in many cases the only surviving indications of what the lost works by ancient Greek sculptors such as Calamis and Nesiotes looked like.
Many of these works the larger ones, have been moved to the Museo di Capodimonte for display in recent years. The Farnese Hercules, which fixed the image of Hercules in the European imagination; the Farnese Atlas is the oldest extant depiction of Atlas from Greek mythology, the oldest view of the Western constellations based upon the star catalog of Hipparchus The Farnese Bull considered the largest single sculpture recovered from antiquity. The group Harmodius and Aristogeiton, a Roman copy of a bronze work that once stood in the Agora of Athens The Venus Kallipygos The Farnese Artemis, again a Roman copy of a Greek original a collection of busts of Roman emperors another set of Roman sculptures that once stood in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. A major collection of ancient Roman bronzes from the Villa of the Papyri is housed at the museum; these include the Seated Hermes, a sprawling Drunken Satyr, a bust of Thespis, another variously identified as Seneca or Hesiod, a pair of exceptionally lively runners.
The museum's Mosaic Collection includes a number of important mosaics recovered from the ruins of Pompeii and the other Vesuvian cities. This includes the Alexander Mosaic, dating from circa 100 BC from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, it depicts a battle between the armies of Darius III of Persia. Another mosaic found is that of the gladiatorial fighter depicted in a mosaic found from the Villa of the Figured Capitals in Pompeii. With 2,500 objects, the museum has one of the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts in Italy after the Turin and Bologna ones, it is made up of works from two private collections, assembled by Cardinal Stefano Borgia in the second half of the 18th century, Picchianti in the first years of the 19th. In the recent rearrangement of the galleries the two nuclei have been exhibited separately, while in the connecting room other items are on display, including Egyptian and "pseudo-Egyptian" artefacts from Pompeii and other Campanian sites. In its new layout the collection provides both an important record of Egyptian civilization from the Old Kingdom up to the Ptolemaic-Roman era.
The Secret Cabinet or Secret Room is the name the Bourbon Monarchy gave the private rooms in which they held their extensive collection of erotic or sexual items deriving from excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Access was known morals; the rooms were called Cabinets of matters reserved or obscene or pornographic. After the revolution of 1848, the government of the monarchy proposed the destruction of objects, fearful of the implications of their ownership, which would tarnish the monarchy with lasciviousness; the director of the Royal Bourbon Museum instead had access to the collection terminated, the entrance door was provided with three different locks, whose keys were held by the Director of the Museum, the Museum Controller, the Palace Butler. The highlight of the censorship occurred in 1851 when nude Venus statues were locked up, the entrance walled up in the hope that the collection would vanish from memory. In September 1860, when the forces of Garibaldi occupied Naples, he ordered that the collection be made available for the general public to view.
Since the Royal Butler was no longer available, they broke into the collection. Limiting viewership and censorship have always been part of the history of the collection. Censorship was restored during the era of the Kingdom of Italy, peaked during the Fascist period, when visitors to the rooms needed the permission of the Minister of National Education in Rome. Censorship persisted in the postwar period up to 1967, abating only after 1971 when the Ministry was given the new rules to regulate requests for visits and access to the section. Rebuilt a few years ago with all of the new criteria, the collection was opened to the public in April 2000. Visitors under the age of 14 can tour the exhibit only with an adult; the Placentarius, the small bronze statue represents a distinctly ithyphallic old nude man who, on the palm of his hand, holds a little silver tray. Official website
Pythia
The Pythia was the name of the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi who served as the oracle known as the Oracle of Delphi. The name Pythia is derived from Pytho. In etymology, the Greeks derived this place name from the verb, πύθειν "to rot", which refers to the sickly sweet smell of the decomposition of the body of the monstrous Python after she was slain by Apollo; the Pythia was established at the latest in the 8th century BC, was credited for her prophecies inspired by being filled by the spirit of the god, in this case Apollo. The Pythian priestess emerged pre-eminent by the end of 7th century BC and would continue to be consulted until the 4th century AD. During this period the Delphic Oracle was the most prestigious and authoritative oracle among the Greeks, she was without doubt the most powerful woman of the classical world; the oracle is one of the best-documented religious institutions of the classical Greeks. Authors who mention the oracle include Aeschylus, Clement of Alexandria, Diogenes, Herodotus, Justin, Lucan, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, Strabo and Xenophon.
Details of how the Pythia operated are missing as authors from the classical period treat the process as common knowledge with no need to explain. Those who discussed the oracle in any detail are from 1st century BC to 4th century AD and give conflicting stories. One of the main stories claimed that the Pythia delivered oracles in a frenzied state induced by vapours rising from a chasm in the rock, that she spoke gibberish which priests interpreted as the enigmatic prophecies and turned them into poetic dactylic hexameters preserved in Greek literature; this idea, has been challenged by scholars such as Joseph Fontenrose and Lisa Maurizio, who argue that the ancient sources uniformly represent the Pythia speaking intelligibly, giving prophecies in her own voice. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC describes the Pythia speaking in dactylic hexameters; the Delphic oracle may have been present in some form from 1400 BC, in the middle period of Mycenaean Greece. There is evidence that Apollo took over the shrine with the arrival of priests from Delos in the 8th century, from an earlier dedication to Gaia.
The 8th-century reformulation of the Oracle at Delphi as a shrine to Apollo seems associated with the rise in importance of the city of Corinth and the importance of sites in the Corinthian Gulf. The earliest account of the origin of the Delphic oracle is provided in the Homeric Hymn to Delphic Apollo, which recent scholarship dates within a narrow range, c. 580–570 BC. It describes in detail how Apollo chose his first priests, whom he selected in their "swift ship", but Apollo, who had Delphinios as one of his cult epithets, leapt into the ship in the form of a dolphin. Dolphin-Apollo revealed himself to the terrified Cretans, bade them follow him up to the "place where you will have rich offerings"; the Cretans "danced in time and followed, singing Iē Paiēon, like the paeans of the Cretans in whose breasts the divine Muse has placed "honey-voiced singing". "Paean" seems to have been the name. G. L. Huxley observes, "If the hymn to Apollo conveys a historical message, it is above all that there were once Cretan priests at Delphi."
Robin Lane Fox notes that Cretan bronzes are found at Delphi from the eighth century onwards, Cretan sculptures are dedicated as late as ca 620–600 BC: "Dedications at the site cannot establish the identity of its priesthood," he observes, "but for once we have an explicit text to set beside the archaeological evidence." An early visitor to these "dells of Parnassus", at the end of the eighth century, was Hesiod, shown the omphalos. There are many stories of the origins of the Delphic Oracle. One late explanation, first related by the 1st century BC writer, Diodorus Siculus, tells of a goat herder named Coretas, who noticed one day that one of his goats, who fell into a crack in the earth, was behaving strangely. On entering the chasm, he found himself filled with a divine presence and could see outside of the present into the past and the future. Excited by his discovery he shared it with nearby villagers. Many started visiting the site to experience the convulsions and inspirational trances, though some were said to disappear into the cleft due to their frenzied state.
A shrine was erected at the site, where people began worshiping in the late Bronze Age, by 1600 BC. After the deaths of a number of men, the villagers chose a single young woman as the liaison for the divine inspirations, she spoke on behalf of gods. According to earlier myths, the office of the oracle was possessed by the goddesses Themis and Phoebe, the site was sacred to Gaia. Subsequently, it was believed to be sacred to the "Earth-shaker" god of earthquakes. During the Greek Dark Age, from the 11th to the 9th century BC, a new god of prophecy, Apollo seized the temple and expelled the twin guardian serpents of Gaia, whose bodies he wrapped around the caduceus. Myths stated that Phoebe or Themis had "given" the site to Apollo, rationalizing its seizure by priests of the new god, but having to retain the priestesses of the original oracle because of the long tradition. Poseidon was mollified by the gift of a new site in Troizen. Diodorus explained how the Pythia was an appropriately clad young virgin, for great
Goddess
A goddess is a female deity. Goddesses have been linked with virtues such as beauty, love and fertility, they have been associated with ideas such as war and death. In some faiths, a sacred female figure holds a central place in religious worship. For example, the worship of the female force that animates the world, is one of the three major sects of Hinduism; the primacy of a monotheistic or near-monotheistic "Great Goddess" is advocated by some modern matriarchists as a female version of, preceding, or analogue to, the Abrahamic God associated with the historical rise of monotheism in the Mediterranean Axis Age. Polytheist religions, including Polytheistic reconstructionists, honour multiple goddesses and gods, view them as discrete, separate beings; these deities may be part of a pantheon. The reconstructionists, like their ancient forebears, honour the deities particular to their country of origin; the noun goddess is a secondary formation. It first appeared in Middle English, from about 1350.
The English word follows the linguistic precedent of a number of languages—including Egyptian, Classical Greek, several Semitic languages—that add a feminine ending to the language's word for god. Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, links the image of the Earth or Mother Goddess to symbols of fertility and reproduction. For example, Campbell states that, "There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source... We talk of Mother Earth, and in Egypt you have the Mother Heavens, the Goddess Nut, represented as the whole heavenly sphere". Campbell continues by stating that the correlation between fertility and the Goddess found its roots in agriculture: Bill Moyers: But what happened along the way to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed to the Goddess figure, the Great Goddess, the mother earth- what happened to that? Joseph Campbell: Well, associated with agriculture and the agricultural societies, it has to do with the earth.
The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants...so woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related, and the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form. Campbell argues that the image of the Virgin Mary was derived from the image of Isis and her child Horus: "The antique model for the Madonna, is Isis with Horus at her breast". Inanna was the most worshipped goddess in ancient Sumer, she was syncretized with the East Semitic goddess Ishtar. Other Mesopotamian goddesses include Ninhursag, Ninlil and Gaga. Goddesses of the Ennead of Heliopolis: Tefnut, Nephthys, Isis Goddesses of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis: Naunet, Kauket, Hauhet. Cybele: Her Hittite name was Kubaba, but her name changed to Cybele in Phrygian and Roman culture, her effect can be seen on Artemis as the Lady of Ephesus.
Hebat: Mother Goddess of the Hittite pantheon and wife of the leader sky god, Teshub. She was the origin of the Hurrian cult. Arinniti: Hittite Goddess of the sun, she became patron of monarchy. Leto: A mother Goddess figure in Lykia, she was the main goddess of the capital city of Lykia League In pre-Islamic Mecca the goddesses Uzza, Manāt and al-Lāt were known as "the daughters of god". Uzzā was worshipped by the Nabataeans, who equated her with the Graeco-Roman goddesses Aphrodite, Urania and Caelestis; each of the three goddesses had a separate shrine near Mecca. Uzzā, was called upon for protection by the pre-Islamic Quraysh. "In 624 at the battle called "Uhud", the war cry of the Qurayshites was, "O people of Uzzā, people of Hubal!". In fact, in ancient times, the goddess and god were known as Allat and Allah, or what would better be termed as deities representing "husband and wife". According to Ibn Ishaq's controversial account of the Satanic Verses, these verses had endorsed them as intercessors for Muslims, but were abrogated.
Most Muslim scholars have regarded the story as implausible, while opinion is divided among western scholars such as Leone Caetani and John Burton, who argue against, William Muir and William Montgomery Watt, who argue for its plausibility. Pre-Christian and pre-Islamic goddesses in cultures that spoke Indo-European languages. Ushas: is the main goddess of the Rigveda. Prithivi: the Earth appears as a goddess. Rivers are deified as goddesses. Agneya: or Aagneya is the Hindu Goddess of Fire. Varuni: is the Hindu Goddess of Water. Bhoomi, Janani and Prithvi are names of the Hindu Goddess of Earth. Anahita: or Anahit, or Nahid, or Arədvī Sūrā Anāhitā, or Aban: the divinity of "the Waters" and hence associated with fertility, healing and wisdom. Daena: a divinity, counted among the yazatas, representing insight and revelation, hence "conscience" or "religion". Spenta Armaiti: or Sandaramet, one of the Amesha Spentas, a female divinity associated with earth and Mother Nature, she is associated with the female virtue of devotion.
In the Iranian calendar, her name is on the twelfth month and the fifth day of the month. Ashi: a divinity of fertility and fortune in the Zoroastrian hierarchy of yazatas. Eleusinian Mysteries: Persephone, Baubo Artemis: Goddes
Dorians
The Dorians were one of the four major ethnic groups among which the Hellenes of Classical Greece considered themselves divided. They are always referred to as just "the Dorians", as they are called in the earliest literary mention of them in the Odyssey, where they can be found inhabiting the island of Crete, they were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the populous trade center of the city of Corinth, known for its ornate style in art and architecture, to the isolationist, military state of Sparta. And yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian, which were not. Dorian states at war could more but not always, count on the assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. In the 5th century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek ethne, whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War; the degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as "Ionian" or "Dorian" has itself been disputed.
At one extreme Édouard Will concludes that there was no true ethnic component in fifth-century Greek culture, in spite of anti-Dorian elements in Athenian propaganda. At the other extreme John Alty reinterprets the sources to conclude that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions. Moderns viewing these ethnic identifications through the 5th and 4th century BC literary tradition have been profoundly influenced by their own social politics. According to E. N. Tigerstedt, nineteenth-century European admirers of virtues they considered "Dorian" identified themselves as "Laconophile" and found responsive parallels in the culture of their day as well. Accounts vary as to the Dorians' place of origin. One theory believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the northern mountainous regions of Greece, ancient Macedonia and Epirus, obscure circumstances brought them south into the Peloponnese, to certain Aegean islands, Magna Graecia and Crete. Mythology gave them a Greek origin and eponymous founder, Dorus son of Hellen, the mythological patriarch of the Hellenes.
The origin of the Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical Proto-Greek speaking population; the dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the Peloponnesus and Crete and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the west's earliest known literary work, the Iliad, combined with the administrative records of the former Mycenaean states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek speakers. An historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the Return of the Heracleidai and by moderns the Dorian Invasion; this theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect.
No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the Bronze Age so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike the East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events; that provides circumstantial evidence that the Doric dialect disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region. The Dorian invasion is a modern historical concept attempting to account for: at least the replacement of dialects and traditions in southern Greece in pre-classical times more the distribution of the Dorians in Classical Greece the presence of the Dorians in Greece at allOn the whole, none of the objectives has been met, but the investigations served to rule out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt that the Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenean civilization; the source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnese remains unattested by any solid evidence.
Though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they settled on Rhodes and Sicily, in what is now Southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the Dorian Hexapolis: Halikarnassos and Knidos in Asia Minor and Lindos, Ialyssos on the island of Rhodes; the six cities would become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians invaded Crete; the origin traditions remained strong into classical times: Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent. Other such "Dorian" colonies from Corinth and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. A man's name, Dōrieus, occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos, one of the regions invaded and subjugated by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we, *Dōriēwei, a third- or consonant-declension noun with stem ending in w. An unattested nominative plural, *Dōriēwes, would have become Dōrieis by loss of the w and contraction.
The tablet records the grain rations issued to the servants of "religious dignitaries" celebrating a religious festival of Potnia, the mother goddess. The nominative singular, Dōrieus, remained the same in the classical period. Many Linear B names of servants were formed from
Hercules
Hercules is a Roman hero and god. He was the Roman equivalent of the Greek divine hero Heracles, the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and for his numerous far-ranging adventures; the Romans adapted the Greek hero's iconography and myths for their literature and art under the name Hercules. In Western art and literature and in popular culture, Hercules is more used than Heracles as the name of the hero. Hercules was a multifaceted figure with contradictory characteristics, which enabled artists and writers to pick and choose how to represent him; this article provides an introduction to representations of Hercules in the tradition. Hercules is known for his many adventures, which took him to the far reaches of the Greco-Roman world. One cycle of these adventures became canonical as the "Twelve Labours". One traditional order of the labours is found in the Bibliotheca. Slay the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra. Capture the Golden Hind of Artemis.
Capture the Erymanthian Boar. Clean the Augean stables in a single day. Slay the Stymphalian Birds. Capture the Cretan Bull. Steal the Mares of Diomedes. Obtain the girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Obtain the cattle of the monster Geryon. Steal the apples of the Hesperides. Capture and bring back Cerberus. Hercules had a greater number of "deeds on the side" that have been popular subjects for art, including: Side adventures The Latin name Hercules was borrowed through Etruscan, where it is represented variously as Heracle and other forms. Hercules was a favorite subject for Etruscan art, appears on bronze mirrors; the Etruscan form Herceler derives from the Greek Heracles via syncope. A mild oath invoking Hercules was a common interjection in Classical Latin. Hercules had a number of myths. One of these is Hercules' defeat of Cacus, terrorizing the countryside of Rome; the hero was associated with the Aventine Hill through his son Aventinus. Mark Antony considered him a personal patron god.
Hercules received various forms of religious veneration, including as a deity concerned with children and childbirth, in part because of myths about his precocious infancy, in part because he fathered countless children. Roman brides wore a special belt tied with the "knot of Hercules", supposed to be hard to untie; the comic playwright Plautus presents the myth of Hercules' conception as a sex comedy in his play Amphitryon. During the Roman Imperial era, Hercules was worshipped locally from Hispania through Gaul. Tacitus records a special affinity of the Germanic peoples for Hercules. In chapter 3 of his Germania, Tacitus states:... they say that Hercules, once visited them. They have those songs of theirs, by the recital of this barditus as they call it, they rouse their courage, while from the note they augur the result of the approaching conflict. For, as their line shouts, they feel alarm; some have taken this as Tacitus equating the Germanic Þunraz with Hercules by way of interpretatio romana.
In the Roman era Hercules' Club amulets appear from the 2nd to 3rd century, distributed over the empire made of gold, shaped like wooden clubs. A specimen found in Köln-Nippes bears the inscription "DEO HER", confirming the association with Hercules. In the 5th to 7th centuries, during the Migration Period, the amulet is theorized to have spread from the Elbe Germanic area across Europe; these Germanic "Donar's Clubs" were made from deer antler, bone or wood, more also from bronze or precious metals. They are found in female graves worn either as a belt pendant, or as an ear pendant; the amulet type is replaced by the Viking Age Thor's hammer pendants in the course of the Christianization of Scandinavia from the 8th to 9th century. After the Roman Empire became Christianized, mythological narratives were reinterpreted as allegory, influenced by the philosophy of late antiquity. In the 4th century, Servius had described Hercules' return from the underworld as representing his ability to overcome earthly desires and vices, or the earth itself as a consumer of bodies.
In medieval mythography, Hercules was one of the heroes seen as a strong role model who demonstrated both valor and wisdom, while the monsters he battles were regarded as moral obstacles. One glossator noted that when Hercules became a constellation, he showed that strength was necessary to gain entrance to Heaven. Medieval mythography was written entirely in Latin, original Greek texts were little used as sources for Hercules' myths. In 1600, the citizens of Avignon bestowed on Henry of Navarre the title of the Hercule Gaulois, justifying the extravagant flattery with a genealogy that traced the origin of the House of Navarre to a nephew of Hercules' son Hispalus; the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press brought a renewed interest in and publication of Greek literature. Renaissance mythography drew more extensively on the Greek tradition of Heracles under the Romanized name Hercules, or the alternate name Alcides. In a chapter of his book Mythologiae, the influential mythographer Natale Conti collected and summarized an extensive range of myths concerning the birth and death of the hero under his Roman name Hercules.
Conti begins his lengthy chapter on Hercules with an overview description that continues the moralizing i
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