Libya
Libya the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad to the south, Niger to the southwest, Algeria to the west, Tunisia to the northwest. The sovereign state is made of three historical regions: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. With an area of 1.8 million square kilometres, Libya is the fourth largest country in Africa, is the 16th largest country in the world. Libya has the 10th-largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world; the largest city and capital, Tripoli, is located in western Libya and contains over one million of Libya's six million people. The second-largest city is Benghazi, located in eastern Libya. Libya has been inhabited by Berbers since the late Bronze Age; the Phoenicians established trading posts in western Libya, ancient Greek colonists established city-states in eastern Libya. Libya was variously ruled by Carthaginians, Persians and Greeks before becoming a part of the Roman Empire.
Libya was an early centre of Christianity. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the area of Libya was occupied by the Vandals until the 7th century, when invasions brought Islam to the region. In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire and the Knights of St John occupied Tripoli, until Ottoman rule began in 1551. Libya was involved in the Barbary Wars of the 19th centuries. Ottoman rule continued until the Italian occupation of Libya resulted in the temporary Italian Libya colony from 1911 to 1947. During the Second World War, Libya was an important area of warfare in the North African Campaign; the Italian population went into decline. Libya became independent as a kingdom in 1951. A military coup in 1969 overthrew King Idris I; the "bloodless" coup leader Muammar Gaddafi ruled the country from 1969 and the Libyan Cultural Revolution in 1973 until he was overthrown and killed in the 2011 Libyan Civil War. Two authorities claimed to govern Libya: the Council of Deputies in Tobruk and the 2014 General National Congress in Tripoli, which considered itself the continuation of the General National Congress, elected in 2012.
After UN-led peace talks between the Tobruk and Tripoli governments, a unified interim UN-backed Government of National Accord was established in 2015, the GNC disbanded to support it. Parts of Libya remain outside either government's control, with various Islamist and tribal militias administering some areas; as of July 2017, talks are still ongoing between the GNA and the Tobruk-based authorities to end the strife and unify the divided establishments of the state, including the Libyan National Army and the Central Bank of Libya. Libya is a member of the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League, the OIC and OPEC; the country's official religion is Islam, with 96.6% of the Libyan population being Sunni Muslims. The Latin name Libya referred to the region west of the Nile corresponding to its central location in North Africa visited by many Mediterranean cultures which referred to its original inhabitants as the "Libúē." The name Libya was introduced in 1934 for Italian Libya, reviving the historical name for Northwest Africa, from the ancient Greek Λιβύη.
It was intended to supplant terms applied to Ottoman Tripolitania, the coastal region of what is today Libya having been ruled by the Ottoman Empire from 1551 to 1911, as the Eyalet of Tripolitania. The name "Libya" was brought back into use in 1903 by Italian geographer Federico Minutilli. Libya gained independence in 1951 as the United Libyan Kingdom, changing its name to the Kingdom of Libya in 1963. Following a coup d'état led by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969, the name of the state was changed to the Libyan Arab Republic; the official name was "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" from 1977 to 1986, "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" from 1986 to 2011. The National Transitional Council, established in 2011, referred to the state as "Libya"; the UN formally recognized the country as "Libya" in September 2011, based on a request from the Permanent Mission of Libya citing the Libyan interim Constitutional Declaration of 3 August 2011. In November 2011, the ISO 3166-1 was altered to reflect the new country name "Libya" in English, "Libye" in French.
In December 2017 the Permanent Mission of Libya to the United Nations informed the United Nations that the country's official name was henceforth the "State of Libya". The coastal plain of Libya was inhabited by Neolithic peoples from as early as 8000 BC; the Afroasiatic ancestors of the Berber people are assumed to have spread into the area by the Late Bronze Age. The earliest known name of such a tribe was the Garamantes, based in Germa; the Phoenicians were the first to establish trading posts in Libya. By the 5th century BC, the greatest of the Phoenician colonies, had extended its hegemony across much of North Africa, where a distinctive civilization, known as Punic, came into being. In 630 BC, the ancient Greeks colonized the area around Barca in Eastern Libya and founded the city of Cyrene. Within 200 years, four more important Greek cities were established in the area that became known as
Tethys (mythology)
In Greek mythology, was a Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaia and wife of Titan Oceanus, mother of the Potamoi and the Oceanids. Tethys had no active role in no established cults. Tethys was one of the Titan offspring of Gaia. Hesiod lists her Titan siblings 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 numerous sons, the Potamoi and numerous daughters, the Oceanids. According to Hesiod, there were three thousand river-gods; these included: Achelous, the god of the Achelous River and the largest river in Greece who gave his daughter in marriage to Alcmaeon and was defeated by Heracles in a wrestling contest for the right to marry Deianira. According to Hesiod, there were three thousand Oceanids; these included: Metis, Zeus' first wife, whom Zeus impregnated with Athena and swallowed. 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, mother Tethys", while in the same passage Hypnos describes Oceanus as "from whom they all are sprung". Timothy Gantz points out that "mother" may refer to the fact that Tethys was Hera's foster mother for a time, as Hera tells us in the lines following, while the reference to Oceanus as the genesis of the gods "might be a formulaic epithet indicating the numberless rivers and springs descended from Okeanos". However, for M. L. West, these lines suggests a myth in which Oceanus and Tethys are the "first parents of the whole race of gods." As an attempt to reconcile this possible conflict between Homer and Hesiod, Plato, in his Timaeus, has Uranus and Gaia as the parents of Oceanus and Tethys, Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans, as well as Phorcys. Tethys played no active part in Greek mythology, the only early story concerning Tethys, is what Homer has Hera relate in the Iliad's Deception of Zeus passage.
There, Hera says that, when Zeus was in the process of deposing Cronus, she was given by her mother Rhea to Tethys and Oceanus, for safekeeping, that they "lovingly nursed and cherished me in their halls". Hera relates this while dissembling that she is on her way to visit Oceanus and Tethys, in hopes of reconciling her foster parents, who are angry with each other and are no longer having sexual relations. Oceanus' consort, at a time Tethys came to be identified with the sea, in Hellenistic and Roman poetry Tethys' name came to be used as a poetic term for the sea; the only other story involving Tethys is an late astral myth concerning the polar constellation Ursa Major, thought to represent the catasterism of Callisto, transformed into a bear, placed by Zeus among the stars. The myth explains why the constellation never sets below the horizon, saying that since Callisto had been Zeus's lover, she was forbidden by Tethys from "touching Ocean's deep", out of concern for her foster-child Hera, Zeus's jealous wife.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tethys turns Aesacus into a diving bird. Tethys was sometimes confused with another sea goddess, the sea-nymph Thetis, the wife of Peleus and mother of Achilles. M. L. West detects in the Iliad's Deception of Zeus passage an allusion to a possible archaic myth "according to, the mother of the gods, long estranged from her husband," speculating that the estrangement might refer to a separation of "the upper and lower waters... corresponding to that of heaven and earth," which parallels the story of "Apsū and Tiamat in the Babylonian cosmology, the male and female waters, which were united," but that, "By Hesiod's time the myth may have been forgotten, Tethys remembered only as the name of Oceanus' wife." This possible correspondence between Oceanus and Tethys, Apsū and Tiamat, has been noticed by several authors, with Tethys' name 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, at the end of a procession of gods invited to the wedding. 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 also appeared as one of the gods fighting the Giants in the Gigantomachy frieze of the second
Argonauts
The Argonauts were a band of heroes in Greek mythology, who in the years before the Trojan War, around 1300 BC, accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their name comes from their ship, named after its builder, Argus. "Argonauts" means "Argo sailors". They were sometimes called Minyans, after a prehistoric tribe in the area. After the death of King Cretheus, the Aeolian Pelias usurped the throne from his half-brother Aeson and became king of Iolcus in Thessaly; because of this unlawful act, an oracle warned him. Pelias put to death every prominent descendant of Aeolus he could, but spared Aeson because of the pleas of their mother Tyro. Instead, Pelias forced him to renounce his inheritance. Aeson married Alcimede. Pelias intended to kill the baby at once, but Alcimede summoned her kinswomen to weep over him as if he were stillborn, she smuggled the baby to Mount Pelion. He was raised by the trainer of heroes; when Jason was 20 years old, an oracle ordered him to dress as a Magnesian and head to the Iolcan court.
While traveling Jason lost his sandal crossing the muddy Anavros river while helping an old woman. The goddess was angry with King Pelias for killing his stepmother Sidero after she had sought refuge in Hera's temple. Another oracle warned Pelias to be on his guard against a man with one shoe. Pelias was presiding over a sacrifice to Poseidon with several neighboring kings in attendance. Among the crowd stood a tall youth in leopard skin with only one sandal. Pelias recognized, he could not kill him. Instead, he asked Jason: "What would you do if an oracle announced that one of your fellow-citizens were destined to kill you?" Jason replied that he would send him to go and fetch the Golden Fleece, not knowing that Hera had put those words in his mouth. Jason learned that Pelias was being haunted by the ghost of Phrixus. Phrixus had fled from Orchomenus riding on a divine ram to avoid being sacrificed and took refuge in Colchis where he was denied proper burial. According to an oracle, Iolcus would never prosper unless his ghost was taken back in a ship, together with the golden ram's fleece.
This fleece now hung from a tree in the grove of the Colchian Ares, guarded night and day by a dragon that never slept. Pelias swore before Zeus that he would give up the throne at Jason's return while expecting that Jason's attempt to steal the Golden Fleece would be a fatal enterprise. However, Hera acted in Jason's favour during the perilous journey. There is no definite list of the Argonauts. H. J. Rose explains this was because "an Argonautic ancestor was an addition to the proudest of pedigrees." The following list is collated from several lists given in ancient sources. Several more names are discoverable from other sources: Amyrus, eponym of a Thessalian city, is given by Stephanus of Byzantium as "one of the Argonauts". Philammon, son of Apollo was reported one of the Argonauts. Jason, along with his other 49 crew-mates, sailed off from Iolcus to Colchis to fetch the golden fleece; the Argonauts first stopped at Lemnos. The reason of, as follows, for several years, the women did not honor and make offerings to Aphrodite and because of her anger, she visited them with a noisome smell.
Therefore, their spouses took captive women from the neighboring country of Thrace and bedded with them. Dishonored, all the Lemnian women, except Hypsipyle, were instigated by the same goddess in conspiring to kill their fathers and husbands, they deposed King Thoas who should have died along with the whole tribe of men, but was secretly spared by his daughter Hypsipyle. She put Thoas on board a ship. In the meantime, the Argonauts sailing along, the guardian of the harbour Iphinoe saw them and announced their coming to Hypsipyle, the new queen. Polyxo who by virtue of her middle age, gave advice that she should put them under obligation to the gods of hospitality and invite them to a friendly reception. Hypsipyle bedded with him, she bore him sons and Nebrophonus or Deipylus. The other Argonauts consorted with the Lemnian women, their descendants were called Minyans, since some among them had emigrated from Minyan Orchomenus to Iolcus.. The Lemnian women gave the names of the Argonauts to the children.
Delayed many days there, they were chided by Hercules, departed. But when the other women learned that Hypsipyle had spared her father, they tried to kill her, she fled from them, but pirates captured and took her to Thebes, where they sold her as a slave to King Lycus. Her son Euneus became king of Lemnos. In order to purify the island from blood guilt, he ordered that all Lemnian hearth-fires be put off for nine days and a new fire be brought on a ship from Apollo's altar in Delos. After Lemnos, the Argonauts made their second stop at Bear Mountain, an island of the Propontis shaped like a bear; the locals, called the Doliones, were all descended from Poseidon. Their king Cyzicus, son of Eusorus, who had just got married received the Argonauts
Oceanus
Oceanus known as Ogenus or Ogen, was a divine figure in classical antiquity, believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to be the divine personification of the sea, an enormous river encircling the world. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek proto-form *-kay-an-. In contrast, Michael Janda has reminded the scientific community of an earlier comparison of the Vedic dragon Vṛtra's attribute āśáyāna- "lying on " and Greek Ὠκεανός, which he sees as phonetical equivalents of each other, both stemming from a Proto-Indo-European root *ō-kei-ṃno- "lying on", related to Greek κεῖσθαι. Janda furthermore points to early depictions of Okeanos with a snake's body, which seem to confirm the mythological parallel with the Vedic dragon Vṛtra. Another parallel naming can be found in Greek ποταμός and Old English fæðm "embrace, fathom", notably attested in the Old English poem Helena as dracan fæðme "embrace of the dragon" and is furthermore related to Old Norse Faðmir or Fáfnir the well-known name of a dragon in the 13th century Völsunga saga.
According to Homer, Oceanus was the ocean-stream at the margin of the habitable world, the father of everything, limiting it from the underworld and flowing around the Elysium. Hence Odysseus has to traverse it. In the Iliad, Hera mentions her intended journey to her foster parents, namely "Oceanus, from whom they all are sprung": Helios rises from the deep-flowing Oceanus in the east and at the end of the day sinks back into the Oceanus in the west; the other stars "bathe in the stream of Ocean". Oceanus is called βαθύρροος and ἀψόρροος, the latter quality being reflected in its depiction on the shield of Achilles: In Greek mythology, this ocean-stream was personified as a Titan, the eldest son of Uranus and Gaia. Oceanus' consort is his sister Tethys, from their union came the ocean nymphs referred to as the three-thousand Oceanids, all the rivers of the world and lakes. In most variations of the war between the Titans and the Olympians, or Titanomachy, along with Prometheus and Themis, did not take the side of his fellow Titans against the Olympians, but instead withdrew from the conflict.
In most variations of this myth, Oceanus refused to side with Cronus in the latter's revolt against their father, Uranus. He is, it appears, some sort of an outlaw to the society of Gods, as he does not—and unlike all the other river gods, his sons—take part in the convention of gods on Mount Olympus. Besides, Oceanus appears as a representative of the archaic world that Heracles threatened and bested; as such, the Suda identifies Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of the two Kerkopes, whom Heracles bested. Heracles forced Helios to lend him his golden bowl, in order to cross the wide expanse of the Ocean on his trip to the Hesperides; when Oceanus tossed the bowl about, Heracles stilled his waves. The journey of Heracles in the sun-bowl upon Oceanus became a favored theme among painters of Attic pottery. In Hellenistic and Roman mosaics, this Titan was depicted as having the upper body of a muscular man with a long beard and horns and the lower body of a serpent. On a fragmentary archaic vessel of circa 580 BC, among the gods arriving at the wedding of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, is a fish-tailed Oceanus, with a fish in one hand and a serpent in the other, gifts of bounty and prophecy.
In Roman mosaics, such as that from Bardo, he might cradle a ship. Oceanus appears in Hellenic cosmography as well as myth. Both Homer and Hesiod refer to Okeanós Potamós, the "Ocean Stream"; when Odysseus and Nestor walk together along the shore of the sounding sea they address their prayers "to the great Sea-god who girdles the world". Cartographers continued to represent the encircling equatorial stream much as it had appeared on Achilles' shield. Herodotus was skeptical about the physical existence of Oceanus and rejected the reasoning—proposed by some of his coevals—according to which the uncommon phenomenon of the summerly Nile flood was caused by the river's connection to the mighty Oceanus. Speaking about the Oceanus myth itself he declared: As for the writer who attributes the phenomenon to the ocean, his account is involved in such obscurity that it is impossible to disprove it by argument. For my part I know of no river called Ocean, I think that Homer, or one of the earlier poets, invented the name, introduced it into his poetry.
Some scholars believe that Oceanus represented all bodies of salt water, including the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the two largest bodies known to the ancient Greeks. However, as geography became more accurate, Oceanus came to represent the stranger, more unknown waters of the Atlantic Ocean, while the newcomer of a generation, ruled over the Mediterranean Sea. Late attestations for an equation with the Black Sea abound, the cause being – as it appears – Odysseus' travel to the Cimmerians whose fatherland, lying beyond the Oceanus, is described as a country divested from sunlight. In the fourth century BC, Hecataeus of Abdera writes that the Oceanus of the Hyperboreans is neither the Arctic nor Western Ocea
Palace
A palace is a grand residence a royal residence, or the home of a head of state or some other high-ranking dignitary, such as a bishop or archbishop. The word is derived from the Latin name Palātium, for Palatine Hill in Rome which housed the Imperial residences. Most European languages have a version of the term, many use it for a wider range of buildings than English. In many parts of Europe, the equivalent term is applied to large private houses in cities of the aristocracy. Many historic palaces are now put to other uses such as parliaments, hotels, or office buildings; the word is sometimes used to describe a lavishly ornate building used for public entertainment or exhibitions, such as a movie palace. The word palace comes from Old French palais, from Latin Palātium, the name of one of the seven hills of Rome; the original "palaces" on the Palatine Hill were the seat of the imperial power while the "capitol" on the Capitoline Hill was the religious nucleus of Rome. Long after the city grew to the seven hills the Palatine remained a desirable residential area.
Emperor Caesar Augustus lived there in a purposely modest house only set apart from his neighbours by the two laurel trees planted to flank the front door as a sign of triumph granted by the Senate. His descendants Nero, with his "Golden House", enlarged the house and grounds over and over until it took up the hill top; the word Palātium came to mean the residence of the emperor rather than the neighbourhood on top of the hill. Palace meaning "government" can be recognized in a remark of Paul the Deacon. AD 790 and describing events of the 660s: "When Grimuald set out for Beneventum, he entrusted his palace to Lupus". At the same time, Charlemagne was consciously reviving the Roman expression in his "palace" at Aachen, of which only his chapel remains. In the 9th century, the "palace" indicated the housing of the government too, the travelling Charlemagne built fourteen. In the early Middle Ages, the palas was that part of an imperial palace, that housed the Great Hall, where affairs of state were conducted.
In the Holy Roman Empire the powerful independent Electors came to be housed in palaces. This has been used as evidence that power was distributed in the Empire. In modern times, the term has been applied by archaeologists and historians to large structures that housed combined ruler and bureaucracy in "palace cultures". In informal usage, a "palace" can be extended to a grand residence of any kind; the earliest known palaces were the royal residences of the Egyptian Pharaohs at Thebes, featuring an outer wall enclosing labyrinthine buildings and courtyards. Other ancient palaces include the Assyrian palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh, the Minoan palace at Knossos, the Persian palaces at Persepolis and Susa. Palaces in East Asia, such as the imperial palaces of Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and large wooden structures in China's Forbidden City, consist of many low pavilions surrounded by vast, walled gardens, in contrast to the single building palaces of Medieval Western Europe; the Brazilian new capital, Brasília, hosts modern palaces, most designed by the city's architect Oscar Niemeyer.
The Alvorada Palace is the official residence of Brazil's president. The Planalto Palace is the official workplace; the Jaburu Palace is the official residence of Brazil's vice-president. Rio de Janeiro, the former capital of the Portuguese Empire and the Empire of Brazil, houses numerous royal and imperial palaces as the Imperial Palace of São Cristóvão, former official residence of the Brazil's Emperors, the Paço Imperial, its official workplace and the Guanabara Palace, former residence of Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil. Besides palaces of the nobility and aristocracy; the city of Petropolis, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, is known for its palaces of the imperial period such as the Petrópolis Palace and the Grão-Pará Palace. In Canada, Government House is a title given to the official residences of the Canadian monarchy and various viceroys. Though not universal, in most cases the title is the building's sole name; the use of the term Government House is an inherited custom from the British Empire, where there were and are many government houses.
Rideau Hall is, since 1867, the official residence in Ottawa of both the Canadian monarch and his or her representative, the Governor General of Canada, has been described as "Canada's house". It stands in Canada's capital on a 0.36 km2 estate at 1 Sussex Drive, with the main building consisting of 175 rooms across 9,500 m2, 27 outbuildings around the grounds. While the equivalent building in many countries has a prominent, central place in the national capital, Rideau Hall's site is unobtrusive within Ottawa, giving it more the character of a private home. Along with Rideau Hall, the Citadelle of Quebec known as La Citadelle, is an active military installation and official residence of both the Canadian monarch and the Governor General, it is located atop adjoining the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, Quebec. The citadel is the oldest military building in Canada, forms part of the fortifications of Quebec City
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature; the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. He enjoyed enormous popularity, but, in one of the mysteries of literary history, was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, "a poem and a mistake", but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars; the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, Ovid is today best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, influenced Western art and literature.
The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. Ovid talks more about his own life than most other Roman poets. Information about his biography is drawn from his poetry Tristia 4.10, which gives a long autobiographical account of his life. Other sources include Seneca the Quintilian. Ovid was born in Sulmo, in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, on 20 March, 43 BC; that was a significant year in Roman politics. He was educated in rhetoric in Rome under the teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro with his brother who excelled at oratory, his father wanted him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling to Athens, Asia Minor, Sicily, he held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales, as a member of the Centumviral court and as one of the decemviri litibus iudicandis, but resigned to pursue poetry around 29–25 BC, a decision his father disapproved of.
Ovid's first recitation has been dated to around 25 BC. He was part of the circle centered on the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, seems to have been a friend of poets in the circle of Maecenas. In Trist. 4.10.41–54, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Horace and Bassus. He married three times and divorced twice by the time he was thirty years old, he had one daughter, who bore him grandchildren. His last wife was connected in some way to the influential gens Fabia and would help him during his exile in Tomis; the first 25 years of Ovid's literary career were spent writing poetry in elegiac meter with erotic themes. The chronology of these early works is not secure, his earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, which may have been published in 19 BC, although the date is uncertain as it depends on a notice in Am. 2.18.19–26 that seems to describe the collection as an early published work. The authenticity of some of these poems has been challenged, but this first edition contained the first 14 poems of the collection.
The first five-book collection of the Amores, a series of erotic poems addressed to a lover, Corinna, is thought to have been published in 16–15 BC. 8–3 BC. Between the publications of the two editions of the Amores can be dated the premiere of his tragedy Medea, admired in antiquity but is no longer extant. Ovid's next poem, the Medicamina Faciei, a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments, preceded the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, a parody of didactic poetry and a three-book manual about seduction and intrigue, dated to AD 2. Ovid may identify this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, one cause of his banishment; the Ars Amatoria was followed by the Remedia Amoris in the same year. This corpus of elegiac, erotic poetry earned Ovid a place among the chief Roman elegists Gallus and Propertius, of whom he saw himself as the fourth member. By AD 8, he had completed his most ambitious work, the Metamorphoses, a hexameter epic poem in 15 books; the work encyclopedically catalogues transformations in Greek and Roman mythology, from the emergence of the cosmos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.
The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies: trees, animals, constellations etc. At the same time, he worked on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets on the theme of the calendar of Roman festivals and astronomy; the composition of this poem was interrupted by Ovid's exile, it is thought that Ovid abandoned work on the piece in Tomis. It is in this period, if they are indeed by Ovid, that the double letters in the Heroides were composed. In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge; this event shaped all his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake", claiming that his crime was
Athena
Athena or Athene given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom and warfare, syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of various cities across Greece the city of Athens, from which she most received her name, she is shown in art wearing a helmet and holding a spear. Her major symbols include owls, olive trees and the Gorgoneion. From her origin as an Aegean palace goddess, Athena was associated with the city, she was known as Polias and Poliouchos, her temples were located atop the fortified Acropolis in the central part of the city. The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is dedicated to her, along with numerous other temples and monuments; as the patron of craft and weaving, Athena was known as Ergane. She was a warrior goddess, was believed to lead soldiers into battle as Athena Promachos, her main festival in Athens was the Panathenaia, celebrated during the month of Hekatombaion in midsummer and was the most important festival on the Athenian calendar.
In Greek mythology, Athena was believed to have been born from the head of her father Zeus. In the founding myth of Athens, Athena bested Poseidon in a competition over patronage of the city by creating the first olive tree, she was known as Athena Parthenos, but, in one archaic Attic myth, the god Hephaestus tried and failed to rape her, resulting in Gaia giving birth to Erichthonius, an important Athenian founding hero. Athena was the patron goddess of heroic endeavor. Along with Aphrodite and Hera, Athena was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the beginning of the Trojan War, she plays an active role in the Iliad, in which she assists the Achaeans and, in the Odyssey, she is the divine counselor to Odysseus. In the writings of the Roman poet Ovid, Athena was said to have competed against the mortal Arachne in a weaving competition, afterwards transforming Arachne into the first spider. Since the Renaissance, Athena has become an international symbol of wisdom, the arts, classical learning.
Western artists and allegorists have used Athena as a symbol of freedom and democracy. Athena is associated with the city of Athens; the name of the city in ancient Greek is Ἀθῆναι, a plural toponym, designating the place where—according to myth—she presided over the Athenai, a sisterhood devoted to her worship. In ancient times, scholars argued whether Athena was named after Athens after Athena. Now scholars agree that the goddess takes her name from the city. Testimonies from different cities in ancient Greece attest that similar city goddesses were worshipped in other cities and, like Athena, took their names from the cities where they were worshipped. For example, in Mycenae there was a goddess called Mykene, whose sisterhood was known as Mykenai, whereas at Thebes an analogous deity was called Thebe, the city was known under the plural form Thebai; the name Athenai is of Pre-Greek origin because it contains the Pre-Greek morpheme *-ān-. In his dialogue Cratylus, the Greek philosopher Plato gives some rather imaginative etymologies of Athena's name, based on the theories of the ancient Athenians and his own etymological speculations: That is a graver matter, there, my friend, the modern interpreters of Homer may, I think, assist in explaining the view of the ancients.
For most of these in their explanations of the poet, assert that he meant by Athena "mind" and "intelligence", the maker of names appears to have had a singular notion about her. However, the name Theonoe may mean "she who knows divine things" better than others. Nor shall we be far wrong in supposing that the author of it wished to identify this Goddess with moral intelligence, therefore gave her the name Etheonoe. Thus, Plato believed that Athena's name was derived from Greek Ἀθεονόα, Atheonóa—which the Greeks rationalised as from the deity's mind; the second-century AD orator Aelius Aristides attempted to derive natural symbols from the etymological roots of Athena's names to be aether, air and moon. Athena was the Aegean goddess of the palace, who presided over household crafts and protected the king. A single Mycenaean Greek inscription a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja /Athana potnia/ appears at Knossos in the Linear B tablets from the Late Minoan II-era "Room of the Chariot Tablets". Although Athana potnia is translated Mistress Athena, it could mean "the Potnia of Athana", or the Lady of Athens.
However, any connection to the city of Athens in the Knossos inscription is uncertain. A sign series a-ta-no-dju-wa-ja appears in the still undeciphered corpus of Linear A tablets, written in the unclassified Minoan language; this could be connected with the Linear B Mycenaean expressions a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja and di-u-ja or di-wi-ja (Diwia, "of Zeus" or, possibly
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