Aether (mythology)
Aether /ˈiːθər/ or Aither, in ancient Greece, was one of the primordial deities. Aether is the personification of the upper air and he embodies the pure upper air that the gods breathe, as opposed to the normal air breathed by mortals. Like Tartarus and Erebus, Aether may have had shrines in ancient Greece, in Hesiods Theogony, was the son of Erebus and Nyx, and the brother of Hemera. The Roman mythographer Hyginus, says Aether was the son of Chaos, started his Fabulae with a strange hodgepodge of Greek and Roman cosmogonies and early genealogies. It begins as follows, Ex Caligine Chaos, Ex Chao et Caligine Nox Dies Erebus Aether. His genealogy looks like a derivation from Hesiod, but it starts with the un-Hesiodic and un-Roman Caligo, darkness probably did occur in a cosmogonic poem of Alcman, but it seems only fair to say that it was not prominent in Greek cosmogonies. Aristophanes states that Aether was the son of Erebus, Damascius says that Aether and Chaos were siblings, and the offspring of Chronos.
According to Epiphanius, the world began as an egg, encircled by Time. Together they constricted the egg, squeezing its matter with great force, after that, the atoms sorted themselves out. The lighter and finer ones floated above and became the Bright Air and the rarefied Wind, while the heavier and denser atoms sank and became the Earth, see Platos Myth of Er. The fifth Orphic hymn to Aether describes the substance as the high-reigning, ever indestructible power of Zeus, the best element, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, Timothy, Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Johns Hopkins University Press,1996, Two volumes, ISBN 978-0-8018-5360-9, ISBN 978-0-8018-5362-3. Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell,1996, Theogony, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd.1914. Hammond, N. G. L. and H. H.
Scullard, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Second Edition, Gaius Julius, The Myths of Hyginus. Edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, University of Kansas Press,1960, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London
Chaos (cosmogony)
Chaos refers to the formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos in the Greek creation myths, or to the initial gap created by the original separation of heaven and earth. Greek χάος means emptiness, vast void, abyss, from the verb χαίνω, gape, be open, etc. from Proto-Indo-European *ǵheh2n, cognate to Old English geanian, to gape. It may mean space, the expanse of air, pherecydes of Syros interpretes chaos as water, like something formless which can be differentiated. Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of cosmogony, Hesiods chaos has been interpreted as a moving, formless mass from which the cosmos and the gods originated. In Hesiods opinion the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate, and it represents disorder, Chaos has been linked with the term tohu wa-bohu of Genesis 1,2. The term may refer to a state of non-being prior to creation or to a formless state, in the Book of Genesis, the spirit of God is moving upon the face of the waters, and the earliest state of the universe is like a watery chaos.
The Septuagint makes no use of χάος in the context of creation, instead using the term for גיא, cleft, in Micah 1,6, a parallel can be found in the Genesis. In the beginning God creates the earth and the sky, the earth is formless and void, and God divides the waters under the firmament from the waters over the firmament, and calls the firmament heaven. In both cases, chaos referring to a notion of a primordial state contains the cosmos in potentia and this model of a primordial state of matter has been opposed by the Church Fathers from the 2nd century, who posited a creation ex nihilo by an omnipotent God. In modern biblical studies, the chaos is commonly used in the context of the Torah. Parallels between the Hebrew Genesis and the Babylonian Enuma Elish were established by Hermann Gunkel in 1910, besides Genesis, other books of the Old Testament, especially a number of Psalms, some passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Book of Job are relevant. Use of chaos in the sense of complete disorder or confusion first appears in Elizabethan Early Modern English.
The motif of Chaoskampf is ubiquitous in myth and legend, depicting a battle of a culture hero deity with a chaos monster, often in the shape of a serpent or dragon. The same term has extended to parallel concepts in the religions of the Ancient Near East, such as the abstract conflict of ideas in the Egyptian duality of Maat. Early work by German academics such as Gunkel and Bousset in comparative mythology popularized translating the mythological sea serpent as a dragon. Indo-European examples of this mythic trope include Thor vs. Jörmungandr, Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka, Indra vs. Vritra, Fereydun vs. Aži Dahāka, and Zeus vs. Typhon among others. In the Theogony of Hesiod, Chaos is a divine primordial condition, which is the origin of the gods and it seems that in Hesiods opinion, the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate, and it may represent infinite space, or formless matter. The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the conception of immortality
Swoon (artist)
Originally known for her street art, Swoon is a mixed media artist who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of human figures. She studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, receiving a BA in fine arts in 2002, Swoon has since been featured in major museums including a 2014 solo show, Submerged Motherlands, at the Brooklyn Museum. Curry was born in New London and raised in Daytona Beach and she moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York when she was nineteen to study painting at the Pratt Institute. Then, Curry joined groups in New York City like Grub and she founded the Toyshop collective, known for organizing events such as a march through the Lower East Side consisting of 50 people playing instruments made out of junk. Swoon regularly pastes works depicting people, often her friends and family and she usually pastes her pieces on uninhabited locations such as abandoned buildings, fire escapes, water towers and street signs. Her work is inspired by art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets.
Swoon started her art in 1999. At the time she was attending the Pratt Institute, studying painting, she began to feel restrained by the sense that her life was already laid out for her. She believed that she would paint a few pictures that would end up on a wall in a gallery or someone’s home. Her art would only be seen by those affluent enough to go to galleries, at the same time she was trying to find what she describes as context. She stated that she wanted to part of the world. Her response to this desire was what she believes to be a literal one. Wheat pasting became a way for her to discover and understand her impact in the world, Swoon describes that as a young woman, she did not have a sense of her ability to make a change. By putting up a small wheat paste sticker, she was able to transform a wall and it was a tiny literal change. The majority of Swoon’s street art consists of portraits and she believes that we store things in our body and that a portrait can become an x-ray of those experiences.
She wants her portraits to capture something essential in the subject and she tries to document something she loves about the subject and has seen in him or her. It is a way to connect with the subject, by putting the portraits on the streets she is allowing for others to witness this connection and make their own. One such connection, she says, has stuck with her throughout the years and she met a woman who asked her about a small piece of art that she had put up in a neighborhood
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably through Homers Iliad. The Iliad relates four days in the year of the decade-long siege of Troy. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid. Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the fairest, in exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the brother of Helens husband Menelaus, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years because of Paris insult. After the deaths of heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris.
The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans and desecrated the temples, thus earning the gods wrath, few of the Achaeans returned safely to their homes and many founded colonies in distant shores. The Romans traced their origin to Aeneas, one of the Trojans, in 1868, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was a real city at what is now Hissarlik in Turkey. On the basis of excavations conducted by Schliemann and others, this claim is now accepted by most scholars, whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War remains an open question. The events of the Trojan War are found in works of Greek literature. There is no single, authoritative text which tells the events of the war. Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources, the most important literary sources are the two epic poems traditionally credited to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. Each poem narrates only a part of the war, the Iliad covers a short period in the last year of the siege of Troy, while the Odyssey concerns Odysseuss return to his home island of Ithaca, following the sack of Troy.
Other parts of the Trojan War were told in the poems of the Epic Cycle, known as the Cyclic Epics, the Cypria, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis and Telegony. Though these poems survive only in fragments, their content is known from an included in Proclus Chrestomathy. The authorship of the Cyclic Epics is uncertain, both the Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle take origin from oral tradition. Even after the composition of the Iliad and the Cyclic Epics and details of the story that are only found in authors may have been passed on through oral tradition and could be as old as the Homeric poems
Site-specific art
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork, site specific environmental art was first described as a movement by architectural critic Catherine Howett and art critic Lucy Lippard. Site-specific art emerged after the modernist objects as a reaction of artists to the situation in the world, modernist art objects were transportable, could only exist in the museum space and were the objects of the market and commodification. Since 1960 the artists were trying to find a way out of situation, and thus drew attention to the site. The work of art was created in the site and could only exist, site is a current location, which comprises a unique combination of physical elements, length, height, walls, temperature. Jean-Max Albert, created Sculptures de visées in Parc de la Villette related to the site, or Carlotta’s Smile, co, ’s architecture Lisbon, and to a choreography in collaboration with Michala Marcus and Carlos Zingaro,1979.
Outdoor site-specific artworks often include landscaping combined with permanently sited sculptural elements, outdoor site-specific artworks can include dance performances created especially for the site. More broadly, the term is used for any work that is permanently attached to a particular location. In this sense, a building with interesting architecture could be considered a piece of site-specific art, in Geneva, the two Contemporary Art Funds of the City and the Canton are looking forward to integrate art into the architecture and in the public space since 1980. Site-specific performance art, site-specific visual art and interventions are commissioned for the annual Infecting the City Festival in Cape Town, South Africa
Nonnus
For other people named Nonnus, see Nonnus Nonnus of Panopolis was a Greek epic poet of Hellenized Egypt of the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived at the end of the 4th or in the 5th century. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, a tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole. There is almost no evidence for the life of Nonnus and it is known that he was a native of Panopolis in Upper Egypt from his naming in manuscripts and the reference in epigram 9.198 of the Palatine Anthology. Scholars have generally dated him from the end of the 4th to the years of the 5th century. He must have lived after the composition of Claudians Greek Gigantomachy as he appears to be familiar with that work, agathias Scholasticus seems to have followed him, with a mid-6th-century reference to him as a recent author. Nonnus principal work is the 48-book epic Dionysiaca, the longest surviving poem from antiquity. It has 20,426 lines composed in Homeric dialect and dactylic hexameters, the subject of which is the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India.
The poem is thought to have written in the early 5th century. His Paraphrase of John survives, a team of Italian scholars is currently producing a full commentary of the poem, book by book, of which several parts have already been published. They have shown that Nonnus was as learned in Christian theology as in pagan myth, a complete and updated bibliography of Nonnus scholarship may be found at Hellenistic Bibliographys page at Google Sites. F. Tissoni, Nonno di Panopoli, I Canti di Penteo, Firenze 1998 Editions and translations of the Paraphrase include, The only complete translation into English, Mark Anthony. Nonnos of Panopolis, The Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, translated from the Greek by M. A. P. Parafrasi del Vangelo di S. Giovanni, canto sesto, Bologna K. Spanoudakis, Paraphrase of the Gospel of John XI, Oxford C. On Nonnus and his context, D. Accorinti - P. Chuvin, mélanges de mythologie et de poésie grecques offerts à Francis Vian. Alessandria L. Miguélez-Cavero, Poems in Context, Greek Poetry in the Egyptian Thebaid 200-600 AD, Berlin Robert Shorrock, Myth of Paganism, Nonnus and the World of Late Antiquity.
Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, Brill,2001 K. Spanoudakis, Nonnus of Panopolis in Context. On the Paraphrase, Konstantinos Spanoudakis, Icarius Jesus Christ, dionysiac Passion and Biblical Narrative in Nonnus Icarius Episode, Wiener Studien,120, 35–92
Eros
In Greek mythology, Eros was the Greek god of sexual attraction. Some myths make him a god, while in other myths. He was one of the winged love gods, Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several different guises. In the earliest sources, he is one of the gods involved in the coming into being of the cosmos. But in sources, Eros is represented as the son of Aphrodite, whose mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals cause bonds of love to form, a cult of Eros existed in pre-classical Greece, but it was much less important than that of Aphrodite. However, in antiquity, Eros was worshiped by a fertility cult in Thespiae. In Athens, he shared a very popular cult with Aphrodite, according to Hesiod, one of the most ancient of all Greek sources, Eros was the fourth god to come into existence, coming after Chaos and Tartarus. However, one of the philosophers, makes Eros the first of all the gods to come into existence. The Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries featured Eros as a very original god, influenced by Orphism, relates the birth of Eros, At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night and the Abyss.
Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence and he mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light. In myths, he was the son of the deities Aphrodite and Ares, Eros was associated with athleticism, with statues erected in gymnasia, and was often regarded as the protector of homosexual love between men. Eros was depicted as carrying a lyre or bow and arrow. He was depicted accompanied by dolphins, roosters, roses, “We must have a word with Aphrodite. Let us go together and ask her to persuade her boy, if that is possible, to loose an arrow at Aeetes’ daughter, Medea of the spells, and make her fall in love with Jason. ”He smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat. Once, when Venus’ son was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, in fact the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. Enraptured by the beauty of a man, Eros drove Dionysos mad for the girl with the delicious wound of his arrow, curving his wings flew lightly to Olympus.
And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire. ”The story of Eros and Psyche has a tradition as a folktale of the ancient Greco-Roman world long before it was committed to literature in Apuleius Latin novel. The novel itself is written in a picaresque Roman style, yet Psyche retains her Greek name and Aphrodite are called by their Latin names, and Cupid is depicted as a young adult, rather than a child
Nereid
In Greek mythology, the Nereids are sea nymphs, the 50 daughters of Nereus and Doris, sister to Nerites. They often accompany Poseidon, the god of the sea, and can be friendly and helpful to sailors, Nereids are particularly associated with the Aegean Sea, where they dwelt with their father Nereus in the depths within a golden palace. The most notable of them are Thetis, wife of Peleus and mother of Achilles, wife of Poseidon, and Galatea and they symbolized everything that is beautiful and kind about the sea. Their melodious voices sang as they danced around their father and they are represented as very beautiful girls, crowned with branches of red coral and dressed in white silk robes trimmed with gold, but who went barefoot. They were part of Poseidons entourage and carried his trident, in Homers Iliad XVIII, when Thetis cries out in sympathy for the grief of Achilles for the slain Patroclus, her sisters appear. The Nereid Opis is mentioned in Virgils Aeneid and she is called by the goddess Diana to avenge the death of the Amazon-like female warrior Camilla.
Diana gives Opis magical weapons for revenge on Camillas killer, the Etruscan Arruns, Opis sees and laments Camillas death and shoots Arruns in revenge as directed by Diana. In modern Greek folklore, the term nereid has come to be used for all nymphs, fairies, or mermaids, Nereid, a moon of the planet Neptune, is named after the Nereids. This list is correlated from four sources, Homers Iliad, Hesiods Theogony, the Bibliotheca, because of this, the total number of names goes beyond fifty
Tethys (mythology)
In Greek mythology, was a Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and the wife of her brother the Titan-god Oceanus, and the mother by him of the river gods and the Oceanids. Tethys had no role in Greek mythology, and no established cults. Tethys was one of the Titan offspring of Uranus and Gaia, Hesiod lists her Titan syblings as Oceanus, Crius, Iapetus, Rhea, Mnemosyne and Cronus. Tethys married her brother, Oceanus, an enormous river encircling the world, and was, by him, the mother of sons, who were river-gods. According to Hesiod, there were three thousand river-gods, according to Hesiod, there were three thousand Oceanids. Passages in a section of the Iliad called the Deception of Zeus, suggest the possibility that Homer knew a tradition in which Oceanus and Tethys were the parents of the Titans. Twice Homer has Hera describe the pair as Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, for M. L. West, these lines suggests a myth in which Oceanus and Tethys are the first parents of the whole race of gods.
Tethys played no part in Greek mythology, the only early story concerning Tethys, is what Homer has Hera briefly relate in the Iliads Deception of Zeus passage. Hera relates this while dissembling that she is on her way to visit Oceanus and Tethys, in hopes of reconciling her foster parents, who angry with each other, are no longer having sexual relations. Originally Oceanus consort, at a time Tethys came to be identified with the sea, in Ovids Metamorphoses, Tethys turns Aesacus into a diving bird. Tethys was sometimes confused with another sea goddess, the sea-nymph Thetis and this possible correspondence between Oceanus and Tethys, and Apsū and Tiamat, has been noticed by several authors, with Tethys name possibly having been derived from that of Tiamat. Representations of Tethys prior to the Roman period are rare, Tethys appears, identified by inscription, as part of an illustration of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on the early sixth century BC Attic black-figure Erskine dinos by Sophilos.
Tethys, accompanied by Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, follows close behind Oceanus, Tethys is conjectured to be represented in a similar illustration of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis depicted on the early sixth century BC Attic black-figure François Vase. Tethys probably appeared as one of the fighting the Giants in the Gigantomachy frieze of the second century BC Pergamon Altar. Only fragments of the figure remain, a part of a chiton, below Oceanus left arm, the above are the only artistic representations of Tethys known prior to the Roman period. Her identifying attributes are wings sprouting from her forehead, a rudder/oar, and a ketos, a creature from Greek mythology with the head of a dragon and the body of a snake. The earliest of these mosaics, identified as Tethys, decorated a triclinium overlooking a pool, excavated from the House of the Calendar in Antioch, dated to shortly after AD115. Tethys, reclining on the left, with Oceanus reclining on the right, has long hair, a ketos twines around her raised right arm
Aesop's Fables
Aesops Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. The fables originally belonged to the tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death. By that time a variety of stories and proverbs were being ascribed to him. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Middle Ages, the process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors. Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another, on the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop’s fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of collections, and translations or adaptations of them, initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious and political themes.
They were put to use as guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the world through depiction in sculpture and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time, apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop. Like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he use of humble incidents to teach great truths. The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that Aesop the fable writer was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE, any fable tended to be ascribed to the name of Aesop if there was no known alternative literary source. In Classical times there were various theorists who tried to differentiate these fables from other kinds of narration and they had to be short and unaffected, in addition, they are fictitious, useful to life and true to nature.
In them could be found talking animals and plants, although humans interacting only with humans figure in a few, typically they might begin with a contextual introduction, followed by the story, often with the moral underlined at the end. Setting the context was often necessary as a guide to the interpretation, as in the case of the political meaning of The Frogs Who Desired a King and The Frogs. Sometimes the titles given to the fables have become proverbial, as in the case of killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs or the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. In fact some fables, such as The Young Man and the Swallow, one theorist, went so far as to define fables as extended proverbs. In this they have a function, the explaining of origins such as, in another context, why the ant is a mean. Other fables, verging on this function, are outright jokes, as in the case of The Old Woman, Some are demonstrably of West Asian origin, others have analogues further to the East
Fish
A fish is any member of a group of animals that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a group to the tunicates, together forming the olfactores. Included in this definition are the living hagfish and cartilaginous, tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered obsolete or paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods, because in this manner the term fish is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification, the earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts, fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era, diversifying into a wide variety of forms.
Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor that protected them from predators, the first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Fish are abundant in most bodies of water and they can be found in nearly all aquatic environments, from high mountain streams to the abyssal and even hadal depths of the deepest oceans. With 33,100 described species, fish exhibit greater species diversity than any group of vertebrates. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide, especially as food and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean. They are caught by fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, fish do not represent a monophyletic group, and therefore the evolution of fish is not studied as a single event. Early fish from the record are represented by a group of small, jawless.
Jawless fish lineages are mostly extinct, an extant clade, the lampreys may approximate ancient pre-jawed fish. The first jaws are found in Placodermi fossils, the diversity of jawed vertebrates may indicate the evolutionary advantage of a jawed mouth. It is unclear if the advantage of a hinged jaw is greater biting force, improved respiration, fish may have evolved from a creature similar to a coral-like sea squirt, whose larvae resemble primitive fish in important ways. The first ancestors of fish may have kept the form into adulthood. Fish are a group, that is, any clade containing all fish contains the tetrapods
Media related to Thalassa (mythology) at Wikimedia Commons