#the pharsalia
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the past is dead the future died before it could be born and me i feel also not so good
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my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “the pharsalia” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯
me: yeah whatever i don’t feel shit.
5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw sulla's ghost intoning oracular words of doom
my buddy lucan pacing: the narrative is lying to us
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Then, on his arrival in Constantinople, after much counsel with himself, considering that he was already unequal to the amount of pressing business and believing that there was no room for delay, on the twenty-eighth of March he brought the aforesaid Valens into one of the suburbs and with the consent of all (for no one ventured to oppose) proclaimed him Augustus. Then he adorned him with the imperial insignia and put a diadem on his head, and brought him back in his own carriage, thus having indeed a lawful partner in his power, but, as the further course of our narrative will show, one who was as compliant as a subordinate.
No sooner were these arrangements perfected without disturbance than both emperors were seized with violent and lingering fevers--
AM 26.4.3-4
this was one of those illustrations that was originally supposed to be a 5 page comic until I realized I don't know anything about later roman empire architecture or visuals or art or anything, so we'll revisit that later. maybe
for right now though, these two are fascinating. we have two brothers acting as one body, even becoming ill in tandem with each other, it's giving This Throne Is Cursed. like, the last time I read about emperors coming down with life threatening illnesses, it was Caligula, and that moment in his biography marked a very specific tone shift. I spent the rest of the (first) time reading about Valens and Valentinian waiting for something comparable to Caligula's reign to happen lmao (Dio 59. 8. 1-2)
and since Caligula was already on the mind, I started thinking about Tiberius: I think he would've loved these two since he had a whole thing about twin-ification and brothers and etc etc etc. ofc, Rome is both a Mouth and a Tomb, so it's going to go badly for someone/everyone eventually, but honestly I think that Valentinian and Valens were the best we could've hoped for. like it could've been so much worse
Tiberius and the Heavenly Twins, Edward Champlin
Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D, Noel Lenski
⭐ I have a tip jar (ko-fi)!
⭐ and other places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app
#(drawing hearts around valens) hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii#roman empire tag#drawing tag#every day i think about valentinian bringing his brother into this and wondering how valens felt about it#especially since the over all arc is that he's constantly just trying to tread water managing everything from six different fronts#did you ever want things to go back to how they were!!!! did you dream of simpler times!!!!!! when it was just hard work and dirt#under your nails instead of the horrible scale of empire choking you out to the very end!!!!!!!!! did you hate your brother for it#im normal about valens. btw. (<<<said by a guy who made valens his icon on his main art blog)#anyway. (claps hands together) im going to go and write about bonifacio and mabini and lucan and crassus and the pharsalia#and mabini's writings on a failed revolution and bonifacio haunting the collective memory#i gotta condense it down to a thousand words. ideally. we are rambling around at around 2k and its unwieldy#valens#valentinian I#later Roman Empire tag
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no more trials! we've run out!
that's the end of the list (civil suits don't count because they didn't have a verdict in the same way)! i sure hope nothing important happened after 50 BCE that 'marked the end of normal functioning of Republican institutions, even if they had already begun to break down in the 50s.' thanks for engaging in the futile endeavour of trying to change history!
if you Do want to experience events after 50 BCE and watch marcus tullius cicero fail to escape the epistolary timeloop then subscribe to e-pistulae (@e-pistulae), where i post his letters dracula daily style. it’s 44 BCE! the second philippic oration is next week :-)
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On the prophetic nature of the Delphic god (Apollo):
What god of heaven suffers earth’s weight, knows every secret of eternity’s course, aware of the world’s futurity, ready to reveal its presence to the nations, and endure contact with humankind? A great and mighty power, whether the utterance it produces determines fate, or whether it merely voices destiny.
- Lucan, Pharsalia (Trans. A. S. Kline)
This is actually the first time I've seen someone talking about the possibility of prophecies determining the fate, so this took me by surprise. Also the first time I've seen the knowledge of the future being a weight that Apollo has to carry, so that's very interesting too.
#Apollo#Also lol at him having to “endure contact with humankind”#Lucan: humankind (derogatory)#I'm reading the part about the Delphic oracle in this work and I'm in awe#will def most more later#Apollo info#Lucan#Pharsalia#mine
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surely THIS 2000 year old poem will be the one to fix me
#tagamemnon#me side-eyeing a copy of pharsalia book 1. i dont need to spend more money#queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra
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normal problem im running into
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now that i’m reading the original latin of the pharsalia i don’t think i’ll ever be over suzanne collin’s genius when she wrote thg. there’s traces of lucan EVERYWHERE but my favorite by far is cato’s story, especially this quote:
“the gods favored the victor; cato the lost cause”
because, truly, the gods of the arena (i.e. seneca crane & co) favored katniss & peeta while cato favored the games, despite their dwindling popularity and hatred within the districts.
then there’s plutarch, the embellishing historian, telling true stories with extra spice to subtly influence his audience’s thoughts. seneca, the respected philosopher and friend of the emperor, forced to take his own life as punishment for conspiracy. coriolanus, the general who treated commoners and his tribunal so badly that they eventually threw him out of rome. enobarbus, the cynic who played both sides in the war between antony and caesar.
#not mcu#not sw#just the ramblings of a classical studies student#thg#the hunger games#suzanne collins#cato hadley#seneca crane#coriolanus snow#plutarch heavensbee#pharsalia
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if epic poems can eat each other (which they can, for example the metamorphoses ate callimachus and the odyssey has consumed lots of early archaic poetry), can they also do kinslaying?
#(yes the pharsalia commits patricide)#(the metamorphoses didnt kill callimachus though it just ate him as is the case for most epic poetry cannibalism)#inward turning upon too-close targets...#mine
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One of those weirdly sanitised queer ancient epic retellings which gets inexplicably massively popular on booktok but of the pharsalia
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can epicureanism explain ghosts
#i genuinely do not know on account of not having read de rerum natura out of spite#(it was included in the uni epic poetry module and the pharsalia was not)#beeps
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cute couple's costume idea spectre of sulla + zombie marius
#dont say trick or treat instead just stare blankly at whoever answered the door and recite book 1 of the pharsalia in latin#unironically think i will be going as some sort of roman ghost this year.. dk why im already thinking about halloween. whatever#need to decide who </3 sulla caelius cato + the fucking prima porta are up there rn#yapping
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#classics#tagamemnon#the poems in order are#aeneid#iliad#odyssey#gilgamesh#nibelungenlied#heike monogatari#pharsalia#beowulf#divine comedy#paradise lost#my apologies to the ones that didn't make it in#drop them in the tags though 👀
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‘late roman republic’ but with the same meaning as ‘my late grandfather’. it’s already dead babeyyy!!!!!
real and true, you understand perfectly, but DO NOT TELL THIS TO CICERO!!!
#hashtag the first city walls dripped over with brotherly bloodshed#idk how they had a two consul system in a. city founded in an act of fratricide. and didn't expect the republic to shred itself in civil wa#or. i DO know how they expected it not to BUT as a pharsalia enjoyer...... yeah
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I'm back, I'm reading Lucan's Pharsalia and idk why but these are the vibes:
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reading about ancient Italian demography and maybe it’s that I went to a talk yesterday about anthropophagy (among other things), but whether or not this particular model bears out I’m obsessed with the idea of Rome as a consumer city of bodies and devourer of its own hinterland. and then when you think about this argument alongside the civil wars of the Late Republic it’s like wow maybe all Rome has ever done is consume bodies and chew them up and swallow them or bury them in mass graves at Pharsalus and Philippi or spit them out in the Tiber in bloody heaps (see Lucan Bellum Civile 2.209-220!)
(from Alessandro Launaro, Peasants and Slaves: The Rural Population of Roman Italy, 200 BC to AD 100, pg. 45)
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