Appetitive: Herodotus and Ancient Temples

So I checked my twitter this morning and reaffirmed my reason for having a twitter (no matter how stupid Cerinthus and his parents think it is).

First, I happened upon (through Marathon 2500's twitter) an online version of Herodotus with facing Greek on sacred-texts.com. Unlike the Perseus version, this does not have a built in dictionary, but it is a clean format for browsing the English and Greek.

Second, I came upon a Huffington Post slideshow of Ancient Greek and Roman temples in Europe and the Middle East. The pictures are not fabulous (many of Cerinthus' pictures are better), but they show a number of temples in France and the Middle East that I had not seen before.

Acropolis, from Cerinthus' photos

This is not Cerinthus' best photo, but I thought I would include something of the pictures that he took and there are a few thousand of them so I thought I would just pick one I liked. More on Plato coming soon.

Appetitive/Reasoning: Book Curses

Appetitive and Reasoning? What would Plato say? O Zeu!

Despite any qualms Plato might have had, I thought I should share this. A friend on twitter lead me to this wonderful piece about Medieval book curses. I'm thinking of having some bookplates made with some curses in Latin and Greek. I found this one especially hostile and amusing:

"Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed."

--attributed to a 16th-century French missal belonging to a man named Robert

To read more, visit this blog on Medieval Copy Protection.