*Sorceress by J. W. Whaterhouse*
My imaginary embodiment in the dim and distant past. I always believed that I look much like the pre-Raphaelites’ Muse.
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more naked youths at Revue_Blanche
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*With the blessings of Hermes Logios*
Ancient pages at Revue_Blanche. Two old stories, amatory themed texts for ancient literature lovers.
In The Satyricon, by Petronius I love many bits (with the excerption of the interpolations); this is one of them:
Embracing Giton, I wept aloud: "Did we deserve this from the gods," I cried, "to be united only in death? No! Malignant fortune grudges even that. Look! In an instant the waves will capsize the ship! Think! In an instant the sea will sever this lover's embrace! If you ever loved Encolpius truly, kiss him while yet you may and snatch this last delight from impending dissolution!" Even as I was speaking, Giton removed his garment and, creeping beneath my tunic, he stuck out his head to be kissed; then, fearing some more spiteful wave might separate us as we clung together, he passed his belt around us both. "If nothing else," he cried, "the sea will at least bear us longer, joined together, and if, in pity, it casts us up upon the same shore, some passerby may pile some stones over us, out of common human kindness, or the last rites will be performed by the drifting sand, in spite of the angry waves." I submit to this last bond and, as though I were laid out upon my death-bed, await an end no longer dreaded.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) writes on The Satyricon in his book A Rebours (Oscar Wilde's favorite book):
"...The writer he really loved and who made him reject for good and all from among the books he read, Lucan and his sounding periods, was Petronius.
Petronius was an acute observer, a delicate analyst, a marvellous delineator; calmly, without prejudice, without animosity, he described the daily life of Rome, setting down in the lively little chapters of the Satyricon the manners, customs and morals of his day.
Noting facts as they occurred, putting them down in positive black and white, he disclosed the trivial, every-day existence of the commonalty, its incidents, its bestialities, its sensualities.
Here, we have the Inspector of Lodgings coming to inquire the names of the travellers lately arrived; there, it is a brothel where men are prowling round naked women standing beside placards giving name and price, while through the half-open doors of the rooms the couples can be seen at work; elsewhere again, now in country houses full of insolent luxury, amid a mad display of wealth and ostentation, now in poverty-stricken taverns with their brokendown pallet-beds swarming with fleas, the society of the period runs its race, - debauched cut-purses like Ascyltos and Eumolpus on the look-out for a piece of luck; old wantons of the male sex with their tucked-up gowns and cheeks plastered with ceruse and acacia red; minions of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women frantic with hysteria; legacy hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lustful caprices of rich men; all these and more gallop across the pages, quarrel in the streets, finger each other at the baths, belabour each other with fisticuffs like the characters in a pantomime.
All this told with an extraordinary vigour and precision of colouring, in a style that borrows from every dialect, that cribs words from every language imported into Rome, that rejects all the limitations, breaks, all the fetters of the so-called "Golden Age," that makes each man speak in his own peculiar idiom - freemen, without education, the vernacular Latin, the argot of the streets; foreigners, their barbarian lingo, saturated with African, Syrian, Greek expressions; idiotic pedants, like the Agamemnon of the Satyricon, a rhetoric of invented words. All these people are drawn with a free pencil, squatted round a dining-table, exchanging the imbecile conversation of tipsy revellers, mouthing dotards' wise saws and pointless proverbs, all eyes turned upon Trimalchio, the giver of the feast, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company chamber-pots, discourses of his insides, begging his guests to make themselves at home.
This realistic romance, this slice cut from the raw of Roman life, without one thought, whatever people may say, whether of reforming or satirizing society, without any moral purpose whatever or idea of moralizing, this tale, - there is neither intrigue nor action in it, - bringing before the reader the love adventures of male prostitutes, analyzing with calm address the joys and griefs of these amours and these amorous couples, depicting in language wrought to the perfection of a piece of goldsmith's work, without the writer once showing himself, without a word of comment, without one phrase of approbation or disapproval of his characters' deeds and thoughts, the vices of a decrepit civilization, an Empire falling to ruin, rivetted Des Esseintes' attention; he saw in the refinements of its style, the keenness of its observation, its closely knit, methodical construction, a strange likeness, a curious analogy with the three or four modern French novels that he could stomach.
We may be sure he bitterly regretted the loss of the Eustion and the Albutia, two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciades Fulgentius, but now vanished beyond possibility of recovery..."
One more story. From Letters of Marcus Aurelius:
Marcus to Fronto:
Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me, with whole clumps of arguments: but you will never put off your erastes--I mean me. Nor will I announce that I love Fronto any less, or will I love him less, because you by such varied and vehement and elegant expressions have proved that those who love less are more to be helped out and lavishly endowed. No, by god, I am dying so for love of you, nor am I scared off by this dogma of yours, and if you will be more quick and ready for others, who don't love you, I still will love you while I live and breathe... For I love you, and I think that this at last ought to be granted to true lovers, that they take more pleasure in the victories of their eromenoi. We have won, then, we have won, I say... And indeed I will swear this with every confidence: if that Phaedrus guy of yours ever really existed, if he was ever away from Socrates, Socrates didn't burn more with desire for Phaedrus than I've burned during these days--did I say days? I mean months--for the sight of you? Your letter fixed it so a person wouldn't have to be Dion [Plato's big fan and patron] to love you so much, if he isn't immediately seized with love of you. Goodbye, my biggest thing under heaven, my glory. It's enough for me to have had such a teacher.
Fronto to Marcus:
...I thought I had long since been loved enough, but for you even as much as you love me it's still not enough; so that no sea is as deep as your love for me. So much so that I could really complain, why don't you love me as much as ever you can, since by loving me more every day you prove that the love you gave me before wasn't the most possible. Do you think that my consulship brought me as much joy as the proofs of your utmost love, so many of them in one place?... And I am that much luckier than Hercules and Achilles, because their arms and weapons were borne by Patricoles and Philoctetes, men much inferior to them in manhood; but my little mediocre speech, not to say ignoble, was lit up by Caesar, most learned and eloquent of all... It's true indeed, as our friend Laberius says, that, to make someone fall in love, "sweet ways are what drive you wild, kind deeds are witchcraft." And nobody could ever have struck such a flame into a lover by potion or love-charm as you, by what you did, have made me dazed and love-struck by your burning love. For every letter on the page, that's how many consulships, that's how many laurels, triumphs, victory robes I think I achieved...
source: yahoogroup Ecclesia Antinoi
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The green carnation, Oscar Wilde’s attribute, though his favorite colour was vermillion. This artificial flower appears in books here and there. Many writers have a dig at it and its owners--“It is said, a wild flower smells warmer if it’s smashed”--and the green carnation has become the first symbol of people who declare their homosexuality, a precursor to the rainbow flag. Despite the widespread opinion, the green carnation had become a gay emblem after Oscar’s death and not before. Wilde's descendent Merlin Holland (Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess) adduces the logical argument: if the carnation were used for a declaration of the kind, then the Marquess of Queensberry had no need to prove something, searching hints between lines of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The green carnation could do what the white lilies and sunflowers could not--the flowers that make Wilde a target of caricaturists. The flowers are but creations of nature--and the green carnations as such did not exist in Wilde’s times. As far as I know, the carnations were placed in a special nutritive liquid which lent them the “Irish” colour. A good example of ennobling Life by Art. What an aestheticism… According to Richard Ellmann, the green carnation first came into being or rather appeared in public at the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, February 20. That night Wilde asked several friends and an actor to put green carnations in their buttonholes.
The bronze statue of David by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488). It is claimed that Verrocchio modelled the statue after a handsome pupil in his workshop, the young Leonardo da Vinci. As far as we know, Verrocchio was an artist who strictly followed nature in his works, so now, in the exterior of David we can see a portrait of Leonardo who was going on 18. Leone-ardo. His eye, his smile… Awesome. As a red-haired young man, most likely he has a milky-white skin and perhaps some golden freckles over the bridge of his nose and beneath his lower eyelids. Taking into consideration his enormous inborn curiosity I would call his face study-wearied. Obviously he sleeps few hours a day. But he smiles--and that’s delightful. Perhaps at the years of apprenticeship he begins to follow contrapposto in his art. As his biographers say, his manner of standing at a moment of repose is like the statue shows, right according to contrapposto, an Italian term meaning ‘counterpoise’, used in the visual arts to describe “a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs”. This graceful pose is simply most comfortable, as we can see. The only inexact detail is the sword in his right hand, for he is a left-hander.
