if normies had to work even a tenth as hard as underemployed fucked up autistic girls with anxiety there'd be riots in the streets

Marble Statue Group of the Three Graces, 2nd century, Roman

[image description: two photos of a statue group of the three graces. all are missing their heads and each only has one remaining arm. all are nude and they lean on each other’s arms and shoulders. two are facing in one direction and the third, standing between them, is facing the other.]

And the Lady Mother heard her.

And a sharp akhos seized her heart.

[image description: a digital illustration of demeter and persephone, both dark-skinned women with black hair. demeter (who wears a long, black dress and black mantle pulled over her hair) holds persephone (who also wears a black dress, bordered with gold patterning, and jewelry) in a her lap in a pose reminiscent of the pieta. the figures are set against a dark purple background, with two sprigs of wheat springing up on either side of them. demeter’s face is solemn and drawn, persephone’s pained. she holds a pomegranate in one hand. both have golden halos around their head.]

Heron Aryballos, c. 580 BC, Cleveland Museum of Art: Greek and Roman Art

In the 6th century BC, a particular type of vessel for scented oil was produced in Corinth, Rhodes, and along the western coast of Asia Minor. Primarily animal forms, they are made of unglazed fired clay with painted decoration. This example in the form of a heron was crafted by a Milesian potter. The bird rests with its delicately curving and counter-curving neck nearly touching the ground; the feathers are defined by incision and painted black slip. Size: Overall: 13 x 5.8 cm (5 1/8 x 2 5/16 in.) Medium: earthenware with slip decoration

https://clevelandart.org/art/1988.65

[image text: Eavan Boland

Eurydice Speaks

How will I know you in the underworld? How will we find each other? 

We lived for so long on the physical earth-- Our skies littered with actual stars Practical tides in our bay-- What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?

Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls, By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him On the shore of a river written and rewritten As elegy, epic, epode.

Remember the thin air of our earthly winters? Frost was an iron, underhand descent. Dusk was always in session

And no one needed to write down Or restate, or make record of, or ever would, And never will, The plainspoken music of recognition,

Nor the way I often stood at the window-- The hills growing dark, saying,

As a shadow became a stride And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight

I would know you anywhere.]

A Maenad (female devotee of Dionysus), brandishing her thyrsos (staff tipped with a pine cone) and a snake.  Attic red-figure lekythos (oil flask), attributed to the painter Hermonax; ca. 460 BCE.  Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Terracotta fragment of a votive relief depicting Hades abducting Persephone

Greek

470–460 B.C.

[image description: a photo of the fragment, made of pale terracotta. the relief shows hades with his arms wrapped around persephone’s waist and chest.]

Ramps for disabled people trace back to ancient Greece

The ramps for disabled people that smooth entry into many public buildings today aren’t a modern invention. The ancient Greeks constructed similar ramps of stone to help individuals who had trouble walking or climbing stairs access holy sites, new research suggests. That would make the ramps—some more than 2300 years old—the oldest known evidence of architecture designed to meet the needs of the disabled.

The evidence for ramps and their use has been there all along, but archaeologists haven’t paid much attention to it, argues Debby Sneed, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach. People tend to think all ancient Greeks were as muscular and fit as the individuals depicted in their art, she says. “There’s this assumption that there is no room in Greek society for people who weren’t able-bodied.” Read more.

[image description: a graphic reconstruction of an ancient greek temple with a stone ramp leading up to its entrance]

Rare Egyptian Bronze Cat Nursing Kittens, Late Dynastic, C. 712-343 BC

A cast bronze fragment of a piece that was perhaps a cuff or applique.

The ancient Egyptians, rather uniquely among the world’s civilizations, had an obsession with cats, both tame and fierce, large and small. Cats were domesticated to help protect crops from pests in Cyprus or possibly Mesopotamia (it is difficult to interpret the archaeological record on this matter for a variety of reasons), but the Egyptian’s love of cats seems to have gone above and beyond that of their contemporaries. The cemetery at Hierakonpolis includes a cat skeleton in a pre-Dynastic tomb (c. 3700 BC) that had a broken left humerus and right femur that seem to have been set by a human and allowed to heal before that cat’s ultimate death.

The first illustration of a cat with a collar comes from a 5th Dynasty (c. 2500 to 2350 BC) Egyptian tomb at Saqqara. Cats were the most frequently mummified animal in Egypt and there were multiple feline goddesses, including the domesticated cat-form Bastet. Bronze statues like this one may have been direct offerings or appeals to Bastet.

[image description: two photos of the bronze piece mentioned above, cast in the shape of a cat laying on its side with three nursing kittens]

Roman Pottery Vessel Fragment with Running Boars, 2nd Century AD

A fragment of a large Roman platter, probably from southern Gaul, made of fine red ware pottery, covered with an orangey-red slip, decorated in raised relief with three wild boar running at full speed, their mouths slightly open, their ears pricked.

@bookwormhistorian

Floor mosaic, 4th century CE, from a Roman villa near Mérida, Spain.

The Ancient Romans left behind many more representations of boar hunting than the Ancient Greeks in both literature and art. Hunting became popular among young Romans starting from the third century BC. Hunting was seen as a way of fortifying character and exercising physical vigour. The boar was known as aper, feri sues or singularis on account of the animals supposedly solitary habits.

[image description: a photo of a mosaic. the center panel shows a man stabbing a boar with a hunting spear against a sparse wooded background.]

Marble mask at Herculaneum, Italy

[image description: a photo of a marble mask set against a stone wall. the mask is in the shape of a woman’s face, her mouth open and her expression slightly shocked. her hair falls around her head in red ringlets; some of the original paint still remains, giving her hair its color.]

Alexander the Great (356 - 323BC ), king of Macedonia from 336 BC), Brooklyn Museum © Gavin Ashworth NYC.

[image description: two photos of a fragmentary marble sculpture of alexander the great. only the right side of his chest, his right shoulder, and his head are preserved. he has long, curly hair and he looks upward.]

Attic black-figure terracotta funerary plaque.  Above, a scene of prothesis (laying out of the dead); below, a chariot race.  Artist unknown; ca. 520-510 BCE.  Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[image description: a photo of the funerary plaque described above. there are two zones of painted decoration. the topmost, which is much longer, shows various people with their arms raised in mourning, standing around a corpse that’s been laid out. the smaller zone below shows three charioteers racing.]

Vase in the shape of a duck, Egypt, 3rd century BCE. The vase is made of faience, a mixture made with powdered quartz, making it closer to glass than pottery. Multicolored faience objects like this one are rare because they were difficult to produce.

{WHF} {HTE} {Medium}

[image description: a photo of the faience vessel described in the caption. it’s in the shape of a small blue and white duck with intricate spots all over its body. its throat and tail are also striped with brown, green, and yellow.]

Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles

[image description: a two panel, black and white illustration in ink and pencil, with strips of text on a white background edited digitally onto it, so it looks collaged. the first panel shows a man with short, dark, curly hair and a beard in a breastplate. his face is in profile and he looks slightly melancholy. the panel is captioned, “in the story of patroclus.”

the panel below shows another man, this one with slightly longer, pale hair. he also wears a breastplate and, although facing forward, looks moodily to the side. the panel is captioned, “no one survives, not even achilles / who was nearly a god. / patroclus resembled him; they wore / the same armor.”]