The wine-transporting ships of Portus The third century marble plaque of the Collezione Torlonia—as represented in Figure 1— is a votive dedicated to the wine god Liber—Bacchus.[1] The relief represents a ship arriving at Rome’s imperial seaport Portus. A line of waves frames the lower side of the decoration on the relief. On the left the waves are high and on the right the waves are low. The left of… Read more
Eugen Bracht: Memory of Gizeh, 1883 In a recent post, Claudie Cox shared her impressions and photos from a tour in Egypt. And a couple of years ago, the Herodotus Study Group was reading Book 2 of Herodotus’ Histories, which included his observations of Egypt and accounts of its history and customs. So this brought to mind a few of the passages from Book 2 that stood out for us.… Read more
Diodorus Siculus This is the final blogpost that was inspired by my reading of Diodorus’s Library[1] for the Kosmos Society Book Club in 2023. Diodorus wrote about the actions of Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, and about the wars of succession that took place after the death of Alexander. Earlier blogposts looked at the general social and religious contexts at the time,… Read more
This is the third blogpost in the series looking at the women that Diodorus wrote about, following our reading of the history of Alexander the Great in Diodorus’s Library[1] for the Kosmos Society Book Club in the summer of 2023. I extended my reading to Plutarch[2] and Arrian[3] to get a wider picture of Alexander’s life. The first blogpost described some of the social and religious contexts of the time,… Read more
During the summer of 2023 the Kosmos book club read Chapter 17 of Diodorus Siculus’s Library[1], which described the career of Alexander the Great. I began to research more widely the women mentioned in the account, which involved researching Alexander’s family, background and contexts. Plutarch was also a useful source for this[2]. The first blogpost told of the sources and methodology I used and described some of the social and… Read more