Gwen Minor

Click here for direct link to audio podcast Episode #60.

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Happy New Year, Everyone! I hope your holidays were full of friends, family, and food! It is my resolution to get us back on a weekly schedule. I have so much I want to share with you and this year I vow to make time! Hold me to it! Send me an email so I know you are out there listening!

Today’s podcast introduces us to two dashing and idealistic brothers whose political lives focused on land reform and empowerment for the common people. Their mother, Cornelia, was famous for her great devotion and dignity. Her example was promoted as the ideal for a Roman matron.

From Weston’s book:
“The two Gracchi brothers in blood, were both inspired with the sense of the evils produced by the decrease in the number of freemen and the increase in the number of slaves in the Roman state, and by the tendency of wealth to pass more and more into the hands of the few at the expense of the many.”

Today’s episode from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys & Girls, retold by W.H. Weston, and illustrated by W. Rainey, published in London & Edinburgh in the early 1900′s.

Enjoy!

For some amazing 19th century prints, check out this website I’ve just discovered:
Darvill’s Rare Prints.

EXPLORE MY WEBSITE TO SEE THE AMAZING
ANCIENT WORLD ACTIVITIES I’VE CREATED!

The Iliad

Click here for direct link to audio podcast Episode #59.

Click here for link to previous audio podcast episodes.

Alas, my trusty Compaq laptop went the way of all flesh and is no more. I lost 3 hours of work, a completed episode, when the blue screen of death appeared. Rushed the patient to Piers, computer physician extraordinaire, but it was too late.

Upon examination, contents of insides revealed a massive hairball from our kitty Thetis, Achilles’s mother. See how guilty she looks!

…Our final installment in our series on Coriolanus. Today, you will meet his mother, Volumnia, and see what lengths she is willing to go for her country! Enjoy! And then go track down your Shakespeare version!

Today’s episode from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys & Girls, retold by W.H. Weston, and illustrated by W. Rainey, published in London & Edinburgh in the early 1900′s.

Click here for direct link to audio podcast Episode #58.       

Click here for link to previous audio episodes.

Sorry to be so long out-of-touch! Summer travels and beginning a new school year have kept me busy, but my classes are now dialed in and the stress of the first weeks has fallen away.

In an effort to understand these historic economic times, I’ve been watching documentaries on what happened in 2008. To hear the voice of the Roman man in the street through Plutarch’s Lives and compare it to the voice of an Occupy Wall Street protester is one of the many benefits we reap when we look at ancient writings, for these times are those times.

Scarcity of food, factious orators, a tumultuous mob of commoners, and the struggle between patrician and plebeian, all mark this episode in Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus. A gift of corn stores from the King of Syracuse arrives in a famine-wracked Rome and the elite 1% consider selling it, rather than giving it away to the citizens. And on which side of the issue did our Marcius speak out? Find out today in our second of three episodes on Caius Marcius Coriolanus, Plutarch’s tale of the ruin of a noble nature by pride.

Enjoy today’s episode from Plutarch’s Lives for Boys & Girls, retold by W.H. Weston, and illustrated by W. Rainey, published in London & Edinburgh in the early 1900′s.

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #23.

Click here for previous episodes.

Did Medea have a choice? Surely, you say, she could have just killed the princess and done enough damage to Jason’s hopes and dreams. Why, you ask, did she have to go and kill her children to top it all off?

Well, the warrior class from the Golden Age of Heroes would certainly have understood the insult to Medea’s ti’me. Ti’me (pronounced tee-may) was the honor code by which the ruling class lived—and when it was insulted, there was hell to pay! Achilles and Ajax both had their ti’me insulted. The entire Iliad is about Achilles’s honor being insulted: Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles!

Medea’s children would have lived the rest of their lives in danger. Travelling with their cast-off mother to Athens would have made them forever outcasts. Outsiders. Obviously, they couldn’t go back to Colchis after Medea’s dramatic exit with her then-new beau, Jason. If they would have stayed in Corinth with Jason and his new gal, the step-mom’s kids would take precedence over Medea’s kids. That’s always hard. And if you know anything about the ruling families of Imperial Rome, you know that step-children are the first to be bumped off. Their very existence threatens the power of the new wife and her brood. And the power women had over their husbands was all about providing children (READ: male) for them.

Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia could not bear him children, so he was played like a card by Cleopatra, who knew her trump card was giving him a son, which she did. How horrible good Calpurnia must have felt, when she heard Cleopatra was going to bear her husband a child! And what about Henry VIII? English children know the outcome of his six wives when they memorize this: Divorced-beheaded-died, Divorced-beheaded-survived. All because the king needed a male heir!

But Medea does the abhorrent because she knows it is the only way to cripple Jason. Sure, if the princess dies, he can always get a new one. But if the princess dies and Jason’s own children die, Jason has to start from Square One. Medea achieves her end. She admits that it will destroy her, too, but she believes she has no choice.

So—what do you think?
Write in to let me know your  thoughts on these great questions
of honor and justice.

And how interesting to compare the
shy, innocent maiden Medea, in the beginning of  Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautika,  to the warrior Medea in Euripides’ play The Medea! Check it out!

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #18

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Woo hoo!!! Can’t you just hear Dionysus jamming to his midnight tunes in this depiction on the side of a vase? As the lads in AC/DC stated so elegantly back in the ’80’s: “For those about to rock, we salute you!”

Euripides’ play The Bacchae details some of the outrageous night-time shenanigans and strange rituals of the maenads, the female devotees of Dionysus, the god of wine. This painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadena shows the maidens, all tuckered out after a night of revelry.

Listen to today’s podcast to find out about the myth of Dionysus.

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #17.

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Come by the San Francisco Main Library this Thursday & Friday for my Shakespeare Kidquake event. On Thursday from 11:15-noon a 5th grade class does A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On Friday from 3-5 pm, a bunch of teens do Theatre Terminate, my Shakespeare death scenes performance. Stop in to say hi!

“Oh mighty Is-is-is-isssss!” A cool 70’s morning show that I used to watch. Ah, the good old days. Lounging around on a Saturday morning. And guess what! Our 70’s heroine was a teacher who transformed into Isis to fight the forces of evil! Maybe she was my inspiration! “You will soar as the falcon soars!” Except that looks like a raven.

My favorite part of Isis worship is the nilometer, for the waters of the Nile were sacred. In fact, a jug of water from the Nile was included in their rituals, no matter how far from Egypt the devotees were. Nilometers, measured sea levels & were built in port cities around the Mediterranean to determine sea levels. Very cool old school mechanical instrument to open the season of navigation in the spring—and the annual flooding of the Nile River. This flooding was essential for the growing of grain along the banks of the Nile. Egypt was famous in the ancient world for its grain production and was the chief factor in Rome’s subjugation of Egypt. Without Egypt’s grain supply, the Roman empire would have collapsed and mass starvation would have occurred.

The nilometers were made obsolete when the Nile was dammed in the 20^th century. Ah, progress….

Here’s our real honest-to-goodness Isis:
Love that headdress!

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #16.

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Twinkle, twinkle, little star….. Humans have gazed at the stars since the beginning of time. Have you ever wondered how the concept of the universe has changed over time? Babylonians, ancient Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Aztec cultures all had their own view of the universe. Mithraic iconography abounds in astronomical symbolism.

The Greco-Roman world was a geocentric world and the axis of the earth and the celestial sphere were thought to be stationary. But in 125 B.C., Hipparchus rocked the ancient world when he discovered the precession of the equinoxes.

On the right is a pocket globe from 1772. The inside lining of its hinged case details the constellations, including the latest discoveries of the time, Edmond Halley’s celestial maps of the southern hemisphere. To see this fabulous object “in person”, you have to visit the National Maritime Museum in London, England. And to see the Southern Cross, you have to travel to Antarctica, where my husband worked for many years. Check out David’s blog to get a
taste of “The Ice”!

And check out this week’s audio episode to find out how in tarnation all this relates to the ancient world!

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #15.

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Surely you’ve seen the statues. The Tauroctony. This one is from the British Museum. A good-looking guy with longish hair, wearing a short tunic, a flowing cape, and a Phrygian cap. He looks nice enough, but he’s plunging a dagger into the neck of a bull that appears to have been minding his own business! My word! What’s up with that? And then you’ve got this little dog and the scorpion and the crab and the snake all hanging out with the bull. Who can figure that out?

Well, as archaeology is a fairly young discipline, we’ve got some catching up to do. The deets about Mithraism are still being catalogued by our brothers & sisters “in the field”. To get a sense of the vastness of Mithraic worship, there are at least 190 known Mithraea around the Roman world and a mere 1/10th of them have been excavated. Fifteen Mithraea have been located beneath Catholic churches in Rome.

But there’s a lot that we may never know or understand, no matter how long or hard archaeologists work. A true “mystery religion”, believers were bound to secrecy on pain of death, so no written evidence exists at this time to describe their rituals and practices. One Mithraic practice we are certain of is that on occasion a real bull was slaughtered above the vaulted underground temple site and the blood of the animal showered down over a select individual. Egads! Let me outta here!  

We also know that it was primarily a religion of the Roman military. Over the centuries, Mithraism worked its way up from the lower classes into the Roman elite. Mithraism took hold in Imperial Rome around the 2nd century CE after the Emperor Commodus was initiated into its mysteries. Freed slaves achieved wealth and status, and veterans of the military retired to Rome itself or some province of the empire and lived out their days practicing their religion. Ultimately, pagan religions were outlawed by Theodosius at the end of the 5th century and Mithraism died out.

Enjoy today’s episode. Next week I detail some of the recent theories on the astronomy behind Mithraism.

Homework for this week: read an encyclopedic entry for astronomy to get the basic concepts down before next week’s episode.

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #13.

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HAPPY LABOR DAY!

It is important to note that the Roman Empire could not have existed without the free labor of those forced into slavery. The island of Delos was the hotspot for slave auctions. There, you could buy slaves from all over the empire to: keep your books on your farm in the country, take dictation in your consul meetings, tutor your first-born son, protect your house, fix your hair and make-up in the morning, manage your villa in Gaul, raise your children, cook the day’s meal, beat & torture your other slaves when they got out of line, and remain so faithful that he kills himself when you die! Imagine—most of the people in Rome were slaves! The worship of Isis by the Egyptian slaves of Rome became a bone of contention with the imperial government and their most important temple was destroyed a number of times over the centuries. Does slave-labor exist today? Something for our young people to think about. And can low-wages be considered a form of slavery? Aaahhh, the quest for the truth leads you down all kinds of roads! Back to the ancient world!

Today’s podcast is the first in a five-part series on the pre-Christian religions of the ancient world. The Pantheon of Greek & Roman gods and goddesses lead the series with a look at the important devotional practices of the everyday citizen of Athens & Rome. Second in the series addresses the Eleusian mysteries concentrated around the worship of Demeter and Kore (her daughter, Persephone). The third in the series explores the military aspects of Mithraism and its early importance to the ordinary Roman soldier and its later importance to the political elite of Rome. Our fourth episode follows the establishment of Isis worship outside of Egypt, and in Rome and her provinces, in particular. The final episode in the series will feature the Cult of Dionysus and all the wild goings-on of the bacchanalia.

Here is the FTD florist logo discussed in today’s podcast, which features Hermes/Mercury, the messenger god.

And a sad image of the revolting practice of animal slaughter for the pleasure of the Roman masses. “Bread & circuses” sums up how the Roman government provided food and entertainment to keep the Roman people off the streets and pacified. Why revolt when your stomach is full and you’ve had some fun down at the Coliseum?

Click here for direct link to audio Episode #10.

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Queen Dido of Carthage. Dead. Built her own funeral pyre and as the flames whipped around her, plunged a dagger into her heart. So thoroughly had she humiliated herself for love of Aeneas, that she could no longer bear to go on. She cursed Aeneas and all of his descendants as she lay dying. Legend has it that her curse was the seed of hatred between Rome and Carthage that lead to the Punic Wars (264-146 B.C.E). Children in Rome were taught from an early age to hate the powerful north African state and all Roman children knew the Latin phrase “Carthago delenda est” or “Carthage must be destroyed”. When Rome finally did destroy Carthage, Roman soldiers were instructed to sow the land with salt so that nothing could grow there. Carthage was abandoned. Later, however, she was rebuilt and became a glorious and influential Roman colony. Some of the best preserved Roman mosaics and ruins are found in Carthage. And to think it all began with a mighty and righteous queen who had her heart broken by a no-good two-timing transient!

Another amazing story of Carthage might is that of Hannibal (no, not the psychopath) and his war elephants, but you have to listen to the podcast to find out! Enjoy!