text:
Quintilian

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35 – c.  100 AD) was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.

Life
Quintilian was born c. 35 AD in Calagurris (Calahorra, La Rioja) in Hispania. His father, a well-educated man, sent him to Rome to study rhetoric early in the reign of Nero. While there, he cultivated a relationship with Domitius Afer, who died in 59. "It had always been the custom … for young men with ambitions in public life to fix upon some older model of their ambition … and regard him as a mentor". Quintilian evidently adopted Afer as his model and listened to him speak and plead cases in the law courts. Afer has been characterized as a more austere, classical, Ciceronian speaker than those common at the time of Seneca the Younger, and he may have inspired Quintilian's love of Cicero.

Sometime after Afer's death, Quintilian returned to Hispania, possibly to practice law in the courts of his own province. However, in 68, he returned to Rome as part of the retinue of Emperor Galba, Nero's short-lived successor. Quintilian does not appear to have been a close advisor of the Emperor, which probably ensured his survival after the assassination of Galba in 69.

After Galba's death, and during the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors which followed, Quintilian opened a public school of rhetoric. Among his students were Pliny the Younger, and perhaps Tacitus. The Emperor Vespasian made him a consul. The emperor "in general was not especially interested in the arts, but … was interested in education as a means of creating an intelligent and responsible ruling class". This subsidy enabled Quintilian to devote more time to the school. In addition, he appeared in the courts of law, arguing on behalf of clients.

Of his personal life, little is known. In the Institutio Oratoria, he mentions a wife who died young, as well as two sons who predeceased him.

Quintilian retired from teaching and pleading in 88 AD, during the reign of Domitian. His retirement may have been prompted by his achievement of financial security and his desire to become a gentleman of leisure. Quintilian survived several emperors; the reigns of Vespasian and Titus were relatively peaceful, but that of Domitian was reputed to be difficult. Domitian's cruelty and paranoia may have prompted the rhetorician to distance himself quietly. The emperor does not appear to have taken offence as he made Quintilian tutor of his two grand-nephews in 90 AD. He is believed to have died sometime around 100 AD, not having long survived Domitian, who was assassinated in 96.

Works
The only extant work of Quintilian is a twelve-volume textbook on rhetoric entitled Institutio Oratoria (generally referred to in English as the Institutes of Oratory), written around 95 AD. This work deals not only with the theory and practice of rhetoric, but also with the foundational education and development of the orator, providing advice that ran from the cradle to the grave. An earlier text, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae ("On the Causes of Corrupted Eloquence") has been lost, but is believed to have been "a preliminary exposition of some of the views later set forth in [Institutio Oratoria]".

In addition, there are two sets of declamations, Declamationes Maiores and Declamationes Minores, which have been attributed to Quintilian. However, there is some dispute over the real writer of these texts: "Some modern scholars believe that the declamations circulated in his name represent the lecture notes of a scholar either using Quintilian's system or actually trained by him".

Institutio Oratoria

Institutio Oratoria (English: Institutes of Oratory) is a twelve-volume textbook on the theory and practice of rhetoric by Roman rhetorician Quintilian. It was written around year 95 AD. The work deals also with the foundational education and development of orators. In this work, Quintilian establishes that the perfect orator is first a good man, and after that he is a good speaker. He also believed that a speech should stay genuine to a message that is "just and honorable". This came to be known as his good man theory, embracing the message that if one cannot be genuinely good, then one cannot be a good speaker for the people. This theory also revolves around being of service to the people. He asserts that a good man is one who works for the good of the people and the prosperity of society.

Quintilian wrote Institutio Oratoria in the last years of Domitian's rule of the Roman Empire. He had worked alongside Domitian, but as he began to write more and ease away from Emperor Domitian's complete power, the emperor did not seem to mind. The emperor was so impressed with Quintilian's devotion to education that he hired him to be a tutor for his family. Domitian was in the harshest period of his rule at that time and almost no one had the courage to speak any idea that was unlike his, but Quintilian did. He spoke as an orator in the tradition of Cicero, such as had not been seen since the beginning of the reign of Augustus. Rather than pleading cases, as an orator of his era might have been expected to do, he concentrated on speaking in more general terms about how sound rhetoric influences the education of the people.

Placement of Quintilian's rhetoric
Quintilian cites many authors in the Institutio Oratoria before providing his own definition of rhetoric. His rhetoric is chiefly defined by Cato the Elder's vir bonus, dicendi peritus, or "the good man skilled at speaking". Later he states: "I should like the orator I am training to be a sort of Roman Wise Man". Quintilian also "insists that his ideal orator is no philosopher because the philosopher does not take as a duty participation in civic life; this is constitutive of Quintilian's (and Isocrates' and Cicero's) ideal orator". Though he calls for imitation, he also urges the orator to use this knowledge to inspire his own original invention.

No author receives greater praise in the Institutio Oratoria than Cicero: "For who can instruct with greater thoroughness, or more deeply stir the emotions? Who has ever possessed such a gift of charm?". Quintilian's definition of rhetoric shares many similarities with that of Cicero, one being the importance of the speaker's moral character. Like Cicero, Quintilian also believes that "history and philosophy can increase an orator's command of copia and style;" they differ in that Quintilian "features the character of the orator, as well as the art".

In Book II, Quintilian sides with Plato's assertion in the Phaedrus that the rhetorician must be just: "In the Phaedrus, Plato makes it even clearer that the complete attainment of this art is even impossible without the knowledge of justice, an opinion in which I heartily concur". Their views are further similar in their treatment of "(1) the inseparability, in more respects than one, of wisdom, goodness, and eloquence; and (2) the morally ideological nature of rhetoric. [...] For both, there are conceptual connections between rhetoric and justice which rule out the possibility of [an] amorally neutral conception of rhetoric. For both, rhetoric is 'speaking well,' and for both 'speaking well' means speaking justly".

Influence of Quintilian
The influence of Quintilian's masterwork, Institutio Oratoria, can be felt in several areas. First of all, there is his criticism of the orator Seneca the Younger. Quintilian was attempting to modify the prevailing imperial style of oratory with his book, and Seneca was the principal figure in that style's tradition. He was more recent than many of the authors mentioned by Quintilian, but his reputation within the post-classical style necessitated both his mention and the criticism or back-handed praise that is given to him. Quintilian believed that "his style is for the most part corrupt and extremely dangerous because it abounds in attractive faults". Seneca was regarded as doubly dangerous because his style was sometimes attractive. This reading of Seneca "has heavily coloured subsequent judgments of Seneca and his style".

Quintilian also made an impression on Martial, the Latin poet. A short poem, written in 86 AD, was addressed to him, and opened, "Quintilian, greatest director of straying youth, / you are an honour, Quintilian, to the Roman toga". However, one should not take Martial's praise at face value, since he was known for his sly and witty insults. The opening lines are all that are usually quoted, but the rest of the poem contains lines such as "A man who longs to surpass his father's census rating" (6). This speaks of Quintilian's ambitious side and his drive for wealth and position.

After his death, Quintilian's influence fluctuated. He was mentioned by his pupil, Pliny, and by Juvenal, who may have been another student, "as an example of sobriety and of worldly success unusual in the teaching profession". During the 3rd to 5th centuries, his influence was felt among such authors as St. Augustine of Hippo, whose discussion of signs and figurative language certainly owed something to Quintilian, and to St. Jerome, editor of the Vulgate Bible, whose theories on education are clearly influenced by Quintilian's. The Middle Ages saw a decline in knowledge of his work, since existing manuscripts of Institutio Oratoria were fragmented, but the Italian humanists revived interest in the work after the discovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 of a forgotten, complete manuscript in the Abbey of Saint Gall, which he found "buried in rubbish and dust" in a filthy dungeon. The influential scholar Leonardo Bruni, considered the first modern historian, greeted the news by writing to his friend Poggio: It will be your glory to restore to the present age, by your labour and diligence, the writings of excellent authors, which have hitherto escaped the researches of the learned... Oh! what a valuable acquisition! What an unexpected pleasure! Shall I then behold Quintilian whole and entire, who, even in his imperfect state, was so rich a source of delight?... But Quintilian is so consummate a master of rhetoric and oratory, that when, after having delivered him from his long imprisonment in the dungeons of the barbarians, you transmit him to this country, all the nations of Italy ought to assemble to bid him welcome... Quintilian, an author whose works I will not hesitate to affirm, are more an object of desire to the learned than any others, excepting only Cicero's dissertation De Republica. The Italian poet Petrarch addressed one of his letters to the dead to Quintilian, and for many he "provided the inspiration for a new humanistic philosophy of education". This enthusiasm for Quintilian spread with humanism itself, reaching northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Martin Luther, the German theologian and ecclesiastical reformer, "claimed that he preferred Quintilian to almost all authors, 'in that he educates and at the same time demonstrates eloquence, that is, he teaches in word and in deed most happily'". The influence of Quintilian's works is also seen in Luther's contemporary Erasmus of Rotterdam. He above all shaped the implicit depth of humanism and had studied at Steyn.

It has been argued by a musicologist, Ursula Kirkendale, that the composition of Johann Sebastian Bach's Das musikalische Opfer (The Musical Offering, BWV 1079), was closely connected with the Institutio Oratoria. Among Bach's duties during his tenure at Leipzig (1723–1750) was teaching Latin; his early training included rhetoric. (Philologist and Rector of the Leipzig Thomasschule, Johann Matthias Gesner, for whom Bach composed a cantata in 1729, published a substantial Quintilian edition with a long footnote in Bach's honor.)

After this high point, Quintilian's influence seems to have lessened somewhat, although he is mentioned by the English poet Alexander Pope in his versified An Essay on Criticism:

In grave Quintilian's copious works we find The justest rules and clearest method join'd (lines 669–70).

In addition, "he is often mentioned by writers like Montaigne and Lessing... but he made no major contribution to intellectual history, and by the nineteenth century he seemed to be... rather little read and rarely edited". However, in his celebrated Autobiography, John Stuart Mill (arguably the nineteenth-century's most influential English intellectual) spoke highly of Quintilian as a force in his early education. He wrote that Quintilian, while little-read in Mill's day due to "his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up", was "seldom sufficiently appreciated." "His book," Mill continued, "is a kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture; and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him...". He was also highly praised by Thomas De Quincey: "[F]or elegance and as a practical model in the art he was expounding, neither Aristotle, nor any less austere among the Greek rhetoricians, has any pretensions to measure himself with Quintilian. In reality, for a triumph over the difficulties of the subject, and as a lesson on the possibility of imparting grace to the treatment of scholastic topics, naturally as intractable as that of Grammar or Prosody, there is no such chef-d'œuvre to this hour in any literature, as the Institutions of Quintilian". In more recent times, Quintilian appears to have made another upward turn. He is frequently included in anthologies of literary criticism, and is an integral part of the history of education. He is believed to be the "earliest spokesman for a child-centered education", which is discussed above under his early childhood education theories. As well, he has something to offer students of speech, professional writing, and rhetoric, because of the great detail with which he covers the rhetorical system. His discussions of tropes and figures also formed the foundation of contemporary works on the nature of figurative language, including the post-structuralist and formalist theories. For example, the works of Jacques Derrida on the failure of language to impart the truth of the objects it is meant to represent would not be possible without Quintilian's assumptions about the function of figurative language and tropes.

title: Quintilian


text:
Ogdoad (Gnosticism)

The concept of an Ogdoad (Greek: ὀγδοάς) appears in Gnostic systems of the early Christian era, and was further developed by the theologian Valentinus (ca. 160 AD).

The 8|number eight plays an important part in Gnostic systems, and it is necessary to distinguish the different forms in which it appeared at different stages in the development of Gnosticism. The earliest Gnostic systems included a theory of seven heavens and a supercelestial region called the Ogdoad. Astronomical theories had introduced the concept of seven planetary spheres with an eighth above them, the sphere of the fixed stars.

In the system of Valentinus, the seven heavens, and even the region above them, were regarded as but the lowest and last stage of the exercise of creative power. Above them was the Pleroma, where were exhibited the first manifestations of the evolution of subordinate existence from the great First Principle.

Seven heavens

All the early Gnostics of whose opinions Irenaeus gives an account, in a section (i. 23 sqq.) probably derived from an earlier writer, agree in the doctrine that the world was made by the instrumentality of archons (angels). The brief account given of the teaching of the first two in the list, Simon and Menander, does not state whether or not they defined the number of these archons; but it is expressly told of the third, Saturninus (ch. 24), that he counted them as seven. At the end of the first book of Irenaeus is a section to all appearance derived from a source different from that just referred to. He here (c. 29) relates the opinions of heretics to whom he himself gives no title, but whom his copyist Theodoret (Haer. Fab. i. 14) calls Ophites. The Ophite teaching may be used to illustrate that of Saturninus, his connexion with that school being closer than with any other. It would have been natural to think that the number of seven archons was suggested to Saturninus by astronomical considerations; and this supposition is verified by the statement in the later chapter (c. 30) that the holy Hebdomas are the seven stars called planets. In fact, the sphere of the seven stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, were supposed to be presided over, each by a different archon. Their names are differently given; Irenaeus (c. 30) giving them, Ialdabaoth, the chief, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaeus, Eloaeus, Oreus, and Astaphaeus. With this closely agrees Origen, who, writing of the Ophites (Adv. Cels. vi. 31, 32), gives the names Ialdabaoth, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaeus, Astaphaeus, Eloaeus, Horaeus. Epiphanius (Haer. 26, p. 91), relating the opinions of what was clearly a branch of the same school, places in the highest heaven Ialdabaoth or, according to others, Sabaoth; in the next, Elilaeus according to one version, Ialdabaoth according to the other; in the next Adonaeus and Eloaeus; beneath these Dades, Seth, and Saclas; lowest of all Iao. It was thought that each of the Jewish prophets was sent by a different one of these seven archons, whose special glory that prophet was to declare. Thus (Irenaeus, i. 30, p. 109) the first archon sent Moses, Joshua, Amos, and Habakkuk; the second Samuel, Nathan, Jonah, and Micah; the third Elijah, Joel, and Zechariah; the fourth Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel; the fifth Book of Tobit and Haggai; the sixth Micah (qu. Malachi?) and Nahum; the seventh Ezra and Zephaniah.

Eighth sphere

The ancient astronomy taught that above the seven planetary spheres was an eighth, the sphere of the fixed stars (Clem. Alex. Strom. iv. 25, xxv. p. 636: see also his quotation, v. 11, p. 692, of a mention of the fifth heaven in apocryphal writings ascribed to Zephaniah). In the eighth sphere, these Gnostics taught, dwelt the mother to whom all these archons owed their origin, Sophia or Prunikos according to the version of Irenaeus, Barbelo according to that of Epiphanius. In the language of these sects the word hebdomad not only denotes the seven archons, but is also a name of place, denoting the heavenly regions over which the seven archons presided; while Ogdoad denotes the supercelestial regions which lay above their control.

Again, beside the higher hebdomad of the seven archons, the Ophite system told of a lower hebdomad. After the serpent in punishment for having taught the first parents to transgress the commands of Ialdabaoth was cast down into this lower world, he begat himself six sons, who with himself form a hebdomad, the counterpart of that of which his father Ialdabaoth is chief. These are the seven demons, the scene of whose activity is this lower earth, not the heavens; and who delight in injuring the human race on whose account their father had been cast down. Origen (Adv. Cels. 30) gives their names and forms from an Ophite diagram; Michael in form as a lion, Suriel as an ox, Raphael as a dragon, Gabriel as an eagle, Thauthabaoth as a bear, Erataoth as a dog, Onoel or Thartharaoth as an ass.

It does not appear that the Oriental philosophy, or the earliest Gnostic systems, recognised any place higher than the eighth sphere; and it is here that according to the account of Epiphanius (Haer. 26, p. 91) dwelt Barbelo the mother of all. But Grecian philosophy came to teach that above the sensible world there lay a still higher, and Clem. Alex. (iv. 25) speaks of the eighth sphere as lying nearest to noeto kosmo. Accordingly, those Gnostic systems which are tinctured by Grecian philosophy, while leaving untouched the doctrine of seven or eight material heavens, develop in various ways the theory of the region above them. In the system of Basilides, as reported by Hippolytus (vii. 20 sqq.), Ogdoad and Hebdomad are merely names of place. In that system the universe is divided into the Kosmos and the hypercosmical region. At the highest point of the Kosmos presides the great archon, ruling over the Ogdoad, or ethereal region, which is described as reaching down to the moon. Beneath the Ogdoad is the Hebdomad presided over by its own archon. In one place (p. 238) the names Ogdoad and Hebdomad seem to be given to the archons themselves. In any case the names shew marks of having been derived from a previous system, for the system of Basilides itself gives no account of the numbers seven or eight; and the number of heavens is not limited to seven, as many as 365 being counted. In Pistis Sophia, the doctrine of the higher regions receives such enormous development that the seven planetary spheres are thought of as contemptibly low; and Ialdabaoth, once their ruler, in this book sinks to a demon.

The word Hebdomad occurs also in the Clementine Homilies, but its use there is quite unconnected with the teaching hitherto described. The mystery of the Hebdomad there unfolded (Hom. xvii. 10) is an independent exposition of the six days' work of creation, and the seventh day's rest; illustrated by the six directions, into which infinite space extends, viz. up, down, right, left, backward, forward, together with the central point considered as making a seventh.

The mysteries of the number seven are treated of by Clem. Alex. (Strom. vi. 16), and in the source whence he borrowed (Philo, de Op. Mund. and Leg. Allegor., where the theme is enlarged on, khairei he physis hebdomadi).

6 + 2 System

In the system of Valentinus again the names Ogdoad and Hebdomad occur in the same signification. Above this lower world are the seven heavens, where dwells their maker the Demiurge himself also, on that account, called Hebdomas (Iren. I. v. p. 24). Of these seven heavens Marcus taught in more detail (Iren. I. xiv. 7, p.72). Above these heavens is the Ogdoad, also called he mesotes, and Jerusalem above, the abode of Achamoth, who herself also is called Ogdoad (Iren. I. v. 2, p. 24; Hippol. vi. p. 191). Over the Ogdoad is the Pleroma, the abode of the Aeons. Thus (Hippol. p. 195), we have the threefold division, ta kata tous aionas, ta kata ten ogdoada, ta kata ten hebdomada. This use of the words Hebdomad and Ogdoad also bears traces of derivation from a previous system, the word Ogdoad occurring in a different sense in the system of Valentinus himself, whose Ogdoad within the Pleroma was probably intended to answer to the Ogdoad outside. Irenaeus (ii. 107) argues from what is told of Paul's ascent to the third heaven against the low place assigned to the heavens in the Valentinian scheme.

First Ogdoad
In the earliest stages of that evolution we have (Iren. I. i.) eight primary Aeons constituting the first Ogdoad. The ultimate conception of God, named the Ineffable Father and who has existed since before the beginning, is described as Depth or Profundity (Bythos). All around him exists a female power that has been named Silence (Sige). These two deities, Depth and Silence, become the cause, through a process of emanation, of the other archetypal beings or Aeons. The Aeons are always born in male-female pairs (as syzygies), each of which is in itself a divine principle but at the same time represents one aspect of the Ineffable Father, who otherwise could not be described nor comprehended as he is beyond all names. The emanation takes place in the following manner: Depth-and-Silence gives birth to Mind-and-Truth (Nous and Aletheia), who gives birth to Word-and-Life (Logos and Zoe), who gives birth to Man-and-Church (Anthropos and Ecclesia). These Aeonic pairs comprise the Fullness of Godhead (Pleroma), and the first eight Aeons that have been expounded here are the Valentinian Ogdoad.

Though this Ogdoad is first in order of evolution, if the Valentinian theory be accepted as true, yet to us who trace the history of the development of that system the lower Ogdoad must clearly be pronounced the first, and the higher only as a subsequent extension of the previously accepted action of an Ogdoad. Possibly also the Egyptian doctrine of eight primary gods (see above) may have contributed to the formation of a theory of which Egypt was the birthplace. In any case an Ogdoad 7 + 1 would have been inconsistent with a theory an essential part of which was the coupling its characters in pairs, male and female. Hippolytus of Rome (Ref. vi. 20, p. 176) connects the system of Valentinus with that of Simon, in which the origin of things is traced to a central first principle, together with six "roots." If for the one first principle we substitute a male and female principle, the 6 + 1 of Simon becomes the 6 + 2 of Valentinus. This very question, however, whether the first principle were to be regarded as single or twofold was one on which the Valentinians themselves were not agreed; and their differences as to the manner of counting the numbers of the primary Ogdoad confirm what has been said as to the later origin of this doctrine.

4 + 4 System
The doctrine of an Ogdoad of the commencement of finite existence having been established by Valentinus, those of his followers who had been imbued with the Pythagorean philosophy introduced a modification. In that philosophy the Tetrad was regarded with peculiar veneration, and held to be the foundation of the sensible world. The Pythagorean oath by the Tetrad is well known.

The Valentinian Secundus divided the Ogdoad into a right-hand and a left-hand Tetrad (Iren. I. xi.); and in the case of Marcus, who largely uses Pythagorean speculations about numbers, the Tetrad holds the highest place in the system.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ogdoad (Gnosticism)


text:
Nu (mythology)

Nu ("Watery One") or Nun ("The Inert One") (Ancient Egyptian: nnw Nānaw; Coptic: Noun), in ancient Egyptian religion, is the personification of the primordial watery abyss which existed at the time of creation and from which the creator sun god Ra arose.

Nu is one of the eight deities of the Ogdoad representing ancient Egyptian primordial Chaos from which the primordial mound arose. Nun can be seen as the first of all the gods and the creator of reality and personification of the cosmos. Nun is also considered the god that will destroy existence and return everything to the Nun whence it came. No cult was addressed to Nun.

Nun's consort (or his female aspect) was the goddess Nunut or Naunet (Ancient Egyptian: nnwt).

Name
The name on Nu is paralleled with nen "inactivity" in a play of words in, "I raised them up from out of the watery mass [nu], out of inactivity [nen]". The name has also been compared to the Coptic noun "abyss; deep".

Origin myth
The ancient Egyptians envisaged the oceanic abyss of the Nun as surrounding a bubble in which the sphere of life is encapsulated, representing the deepest mystery of their cosmogony. In ancient Egyptian creation accounts, the original mound of land comes forth from the waters of the Nun. The Nun is the source of all that appears in a differentiated world, encompassing all aspects of divine and earthly existence. In the Ennead cosmogony, Nun is perceived as transcendent at the point of creation alongside Atum the creator god.

Creation myth
In the beginning the universe only consisted of a great chaotic cosmic ocean, and the ocean itself was referred to as Nu. In some versions of this myth, at the beginning of time Mehet-Weret, portrayed as a cow with a sun disk between her horns, gives birth to the sun, said to have risen from the waters of creation and to have given birth to the sun god Ra in some myths. The universe was enrapt by a vast mass of primordial waters, and the Benben, a pyramid mound, emerged amid this primal chaos. There was a lotus flower with Benben, and from this when it blossomed emerged Ra. There were many versions of the sun's emergence, and it was said to have emerged directly from the mound or from a lotus flower that grew from the mound, in the form of a heron, falcon, scarab beetle, or human child. In Heliopolis, the creation was attributed to Atum, a deity closely associated with Ra, who was said to have existed in the waters of Nu as an inert potential being.

History
Beginning with the Middle Kingdom, Nun is described as "the father of the gods" and he is depicted on temple walls throughout the rest of ancient Egyptian religious history.

The Ogdoad includes along with Naunet and Nun, Amaunet and Amun; Hauhet and Heh; and Kauket and Kek. Like the other Ogdoad deities, Nu did not have temples or any center of worship. Even so, Nu was sometimes represented by a sacred lake, or, as at Abydos, by an underground stream.

Iconography
Nun was depicted as an anthropomorphic large figure and a personification of the primordial waters, with water ripples filling the body, holding a notched palm branch. Nun was also depicted in anthropomorphic form but with the head of a frog, and he was typically depicted in ancient Egyptian art holding aloft the solar barque or the sun disc. He may appear greeting the rising sun in the guise of a baboon. Nun is otherwise symbolized by the presence of a sacred cistern or lake as in the sanctuaries of Karnak and Dendara. Nu was shown usually as male but also had aspects that could be represented as female or male. Naunet (also spelt Nunet) is the female aspect, which is the name Nu with a female gender ending. The male aspect, Nun, is written with a male gender ending. As with the primordial concepts of the Ogdoad, Nu's male aspect was depicted as a frog, or a frog-headed man. In Ancient Egyptian art, Nun also appears as a bearded man, with blue-green skin, representing water. Naunet is represented as a snake or snake-headed woman.

In the 12th Hour of the Book of Gates, Nu is depicted with upraised arms holding a solar bark (or barque, a boat). The boat is occupied by eight deities with Khepri, Ra's morning aspect, standing in the middle and being surrounded by the seven other deities.

During the Late Period when Egypt was occupied by foreign powers, the negative aspect of Nun (ie. chaos) became the dominant perception, reflecting the forces of disorder that were set loose in the country.

title: Nu (mythology)


text:
Gabrielle d'Estrées

Gabrielle d'Estrées, Duchess of Beaufort and Verneuil, Marchioness of Monceaux (1573  – 10 April 1599) was a mistress, confidante and adviser of Henry IV of France. She is noted for her role in ending the religious civil wars that plagued France for more than 30 years.

She persuaded Henry to renounce Protestantism in favour of Catholicism in 1593. Later she urged French Catholics to accept the Edict of Nantes, which granted certain rights to the Protestants. As it was legally impossible for the King to marry her as he was already married to Margaret of Valois, he controversially petitioned Pope Clement VIII for an annulment in February 1599 to end his childless first marriage, and announced his intention to marry Gabrielle and have her crowned the next Queen of France, while legitimizing their three children born out of wedlock. Her coronation and wedding never occurred due to her untimely and sudden death.

Birth
Gabrielle d'Estrées was born at either the Château de la Bourdaisière in Montlouis-sur-Loire in Touraine, or at the Château de Cœuvres in Picardy. Her parents were Antoine d'Estrées, Marquis of Cœuvres, and Françoise Babou de La Bourdaisière. The women in her family, particularly on her mother's side, were noted for the beauty prized in the French royal court. Her sister Diane became the mistress of Épernon and her aunt Isabelle also had the same relationship with Chancellor Philippe Hurault de Cheverny.

Royal mistress
In November 1590, King Henry IV of France fell in love with Gabrielle d'Estrées. She became one of his many mistresses in the middle of his bitter struggle with the Catholic League. Although he was married to Margaret of Valois, Henry and Gabrielle were openly affectionate with each other in public. Her father, anxious to save his daughter from so perilous an entanglement, married her to Nicholas d'Amerval, seigneur de Liancourt, though the union proved unhappy, and was annulled by 1595.

Fiercely loyal, Gabrielle accompanied Henry during his campaigns. Even when heavily pregnant, she insisted on living inside his tent near the battlefield, making sure his clothing was clean and that he ate well after a battle, handling the day-to-day correspondence while he fought. As she was intelligent and practical, Henry confided his secrets to her and followed her advice. When the two were apart, Henry frequently wrote her letters while on his sojourn trips at war camps.

Born a Catholic, Gabrielle knew that the best way to conclude the religious wars was for Henry himself to become a Catholic. Her argument was that the League's strongholds in Paris and Rouen would support him once he renounced Protestantism, and that the citizens could also be persuaded to side with him against the League, if they were made to see that it was a pawn of foreign powers. Recognizing the wisdom in her argument, on 25 July 1593, Henry supposedly declared that "Paris is well worth a Mass" when he permanently renounced Protestantism. This enabled him to be crowned King of France on 27 February 1594. Henry also arranged for Gabrielle's marriage to Liancourt to be annulled the same year.

On 7 June 1594, their first child was born: a son, César de Bourbon, future Duke of Vendôme. On 4 January 1595, Henry IV officially recognized and legitimized his son in a text validated by the Parlement of Paris. In that text he also recognized Gabrielle d'Estrées as the mother of his son and as "the subject the most worthy of our friendship"; in other words, Henry IV had the Parlement of Paris officially ratify Gabrielle's position as his mistress. In 1596, he made her Marquise de Montceaux, and she purchased from the estate of Catherine de' Medici the Château de Montceaux at auction for 39,000 écus, money which he probably gave her. In the following year he made her Duchesse de Beaufort, a peeress of France.

Henry IV also recognized and legitimized two more children he had with Gabrielle: Catherine-Henriette de Bourbon, a daughter born in 1596, and Alexandre de Bourbon, a son born in 1598. The relationship between Henry and Gabrielle did not sit well with some members of the French aristocracy, and malicious pamphlets circulated that blamed the new duchess for many national misfortunes. One of the most vicious nicknames ascribed to Gabrielle was la duchesse d'Ordure ("the Duchess of Filth").

Gabrielle became Henry's most important diplomat, using her female friends amongst the various Catholic League families to bring about peace. In March 1596, Henry gave both Gabrielle and his sister Catherine a set of gold keys, which bestowed upon them seats on his council. This gift pleased Gabrielle so much that she took to wearing the little keys on a chain around her neck.

In 1598, Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Huguenots certain rights, while deferring to Catholics. Joining forces, the Huguenot Catherine and the Catholic Gabrielle went to work overriding the objections of powerful Catholics and Huguenots, forcing compliance with the edict. Henry was so impressed with her efforts that he wrote: "My mistress has become an orator of unequaled brilliance, so fiercely does she argue the cause of the new Edict."

Death and aftermath
After applying to Pope Clement VIII for an annulment of his marriage and authority to remarry, in March 1599 Henry gave his mistress his coronation ring. Gabrielle, so sure that the wedding would take place, stated, "Only God or the king's death could put an end to my good luck". A few days later, on 9 April, she suffered an attack of eclampsia and gave birth to a stillborn son. King Henry was at the Château de Fontainebleau when news arrived of her illness. The next day, 10 April 1599, while Henry was on his way to her, she died in Paris.

The King was grief-stricken, especially given the widely held rumor that Gabrielle had been poisoned. He wore black in mourning, something no previous French monarch had done. He gave her the funeral of a queen; her coffin was transported amidst a procession of princes, princesses, and nobles to the Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois church in Paris, for a requiem mass. Remembered in French history and song as La Belle Gabrielle, she was interred in the Notre-Dame-La-Royale at Maubuisson Abbey in Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône (Val-d'Oise, Île-de-France).

A publication after her death called the Mémoires secrets de Gabrielle d'Estrée ("The Secret Memoirs of Gabrielle d'Estrée") is believed to have been written by one of her friends.

Children
Her four children with Henry were:
 * César, Duke of Vendôme (1594–1665); married Françoise de Lorraine and had issue. In 1626, he participated in a plot against Cardinal Richelieu. César was captured and held in prison for three years. In 1641 he was accused of conspiracy again and this time fled to England.
 * Catherine Henriette de Bourbon (1596–1663); married Charles II, Duke of Elbeuf. Had issue
 * Alexandre, Chevalier de Vendôme (1598–1629).
 * stillborn son* (1599).

Representation in art
Gabrielle is the subject of the painting Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses sœurs by Francois Clouet, which is held in the Louvre Museum in Paris. In the painting, Gabrielle sits unclothed in a bathtub in which is covered in cloth, holding what is presumed to be Henry's coronation ring given to her before their wedding and her death, whilst her sister Julienne-Hippolyte-Joséphine, Duchess of Villars, also sits unclothed beside her and pinches Gabrielle’s right nipple. Henry gave Gabrielle the ring as a token of his love shortly before she died.

A very similar painting with the same characters in different positions is in the Palace of Fontainebleau, and yet a third one without her sister in the Musée Condé in the Château de Chantilly.

J. M. W. Turner painted a watercolour of "Fair Gabrielle" at Bougival.

title: Gabrielle d'Estrées


text:
Amunet

Amunet or Imnt (The Hidden One in hieroglyphics; also spelled Amonet or Amaunet; )  is a primordial goddess in ancient Egyptian religion. Thebes was the center of her worship through the last dynasty, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, in 30 BCE. She is attested in the earliest known of Egyptian religious texts and, as was the custom, was paired with a counterpart who is entitled with the same name, but in the masculine, Amun. They were thought to have existed prior to the beginning of creation along with three other couples representing primeval concepts.

Primeval counterparts
Her name, jmnt, is a feminine noun that means "The Hidden One". She is a member of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, who represented aspects of the primeval existence before the creation: Amunet was paired with Amun—whose name also means "The Hidden One", with a masculine ending (jmn)—within this divine group, from the earliest known documentation. Such pairing of deities is characteristic of the religious concepts of the ancient Egyptians. In early concepts known as the Ogdoad, the primeval deity group to which they belonged as "Night" (or as the determinative D41 meaning "to halt, stop, deny", suggesting the principle of inactivity or repose), was composed of four balanced couples of deities or deified primeval concepts.

Speculation exists that Amunet may have been conceived by later theologians as a complement to Amun, rather than being an independent deity originally, however, the Pyramid Texts, the earliest known religious texts of Ancient Egypt, mention "the beneficent shadow of Amun and Amunet":

"O Amun and Amunet! You pair of the gods, who joined the gods with their shadow."

Cult becomes localized
By at least the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt (c. 1991–1803 BC), Amunet often was superseded by Mut as Amun's partner, as cults evolved or similar ones in other regions were merged following Mentuhotep II's reunification of Egypt—but Amunet remained locally important in Thebes, where Amun was worshipped. In that capitol of the unified country she was seen as a protector of the king, playing a preeminent role in rituals associated with the royal coronation (khaj-nisut) and Sed festivals (heb-sed) celebrating its well-celebrated anniversaries, and priests were dedicated to Amunet's service at Karnak, Amun's cult center.

In the Festival Hall of Thutmose III (c. 1479–1425 BC), Amunet is shown with the fertility god Min while leading a row of deities to visit the king in the anniversary celebration. In spite of Amunet's stable position as a local goddess of Egypt's most important city, her cult began to have very little following outside the Theban region that developed into a dominant religious center for the unified country.

Amunet was depicted as a woman wearing the Deshret "Red Crown of Lower Egypt" and carrying a staff of papyrus—as in her colossal statue placed during the reign of Tutankhamun (c. 1332–1323 BC) into the Record Hall of Thutmose III at Karnak. The reason for this iconography is uncertain. At that time, the cult of Amun was being restored after being displaced by worship of Aten during the reign of Akhenaten.

Although she remained a distinct deity as late as the Ptolemaic Kingdom (323–30 BC), in some late texts from Karnak Amunet was syncretized with Neith and she was carved suckling pharaoh Philip III of Macedon (323–317 BC) who appears as a divine child immediately after his own enthronement, onto an exterior wall of the eighteenth dynasty Festival Hall of Thutmose III at Karnak.

title: Amunet


text:
Kek (mythology)

Kek is the deification of the concept of primordial darkness in the ancient Egyptian Ogdoad cosmogony of Hermopolis.

The Ogdoad consisted of four pairs of deities, four male gods paired with their female counterparts. Kek's female counterpart was Kauket. Kek and Kauket in some aspects also represent night and day, and were called "raiser up of the light" and the "raiser up of the night", respectively.

The name is written as kk or kkwy with a variant of the sky hieroglyph in ligature with the staff (N2) associated with the word for "darkness" kkw.

History
In the oldest representations, Kekui is given the head of a serpent, and Kekuit the head of either a frog or a cat. In one scene, they are identified with Ka and Kait; in this scene, Ka-Kekui has the head of a frog surmounted by a beetle and Kait-Kekuit has the head of a serpent surmounted by a disk.

In the Greco-Roman period, Kek's male form was depicted as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a serpent-headed woman, as were all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad.

In popular culture
In relation to the 2016 United States presidential election, individuals associated with online message boards, such as 4chan, noted a similarity between Kek and the character Pepe the Frog. This was later paired with images of Pepe, resulting in a resurgence of interest in the ancient deity.

Believers in Kek say that repeating integers, often called “dubs”, are the prima materia of reality, and that their occurrence invoke the deity.

Elon Musk has made numerous references to Pepe and even to Kek, among others within the perceived right wing such as Donald Trump, who tweeted himself as a version of the frog. Believers have cited this as evidence of memetic synchronicity.

title: Kek (mythology)


text:
Joseph Lannin

Joseph John Lannin (April 23, 1866 – May 15, 1928) was a Canadian-born American baseball entrepreneur. He was the sole owner of the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball for most of the 1914 through 1916 seasons, during which the team won two World Series.

Biography
Lannin was born on April 23, 1866, in Lac-Beauport, Canada East to John Lannin and Catherine Evans. His parents were Irish immigrants. Orphaned at the age of 14, Lannin migrated from Quebec to Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked as a hotel bellboy. Penniless, he had remarkably made his way from Lac-Beauport to Boston on foot. He married Hannah Furlong and had two children, Paul Joseph Lannin and Dorothy A. Lannin.

Although he had limited education, Lannin was personable and possessed a quick mind. He soon learned about real estate and the commodities market by listening to conversations of the wealthy patrons at his hotel and taking advice from those who were willing to share their insights with him. A confident and knowledgeable Lannin invested his savings in the commodities market, making a small fortune. From there he began to acquire other businesses and eventually built an empire of hotels, apartment buildings, and golf courses.

On December 21, 1913, Lannin and a group of investors purchased 50% of the Boston Red Sox baseball team from Jimmy McAleer and Robert B. McRoy. In 1914, he became the sole owner of the Red Sox and in that same year he purchased the rights to bring Babe Ruth to Boston. The team went on to win the World Series in and.

Lannin sold the team in 1917 to Harry Frazee for $675,000. He was quoted as saying, "I am too much of a fan to be an owner." With the profit made from the sale of his team, he continued to invest in real estate ventures all around Boston and across New York State.

Lannin acquired Roosevelt Airfield on Long Island, where Charles Lindbergh began his historic transatlantic flight. Lannin provided Lindbergh with a room at his nearby hotel and watched the takeoff from Roosevelt Airfield on May 20, 1927.

Lannin died on May 15, 1928, aged 62, in Brooklyn, having fallen or jumped from a window of a hotel that he owned; it was not known if he had a medical issue or died by suicide. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at $7,000,000. He is interred at the Cemetery of the Holy Rood, Garden City, New York.

Lannin was inducted to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2004.

title: Joseph Lannin


text:
Martial

Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial ; March, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD) was a Roman poet born in Hispania (modern Spain) best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these poems he satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.

Martial has been called the greatest Latin epigrammatist, and is considered the creator of the modern epigram.

Early life
Knowledge of his origins and early life are derived almost entirely from his works, which can be more or less dated according to the well-known events to which they refer. In Book X of his Epigrams, composed between 95 and 98, he mentions celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday; hence he was born during March 38, 39, 40 or 41 AD (x. 24, 1), under Caligula or Claudius. His place of birth was Augusta Bilbilis (now Calatayud) in Hispania Tarraconensis. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla, appear to have died in his youth.

His name seems to imply that he was born a Roman citizen, but he speaks of himself as "sprung from the Celts and Iberians, and a countryman of the Tagus"; and, in contrasting his own masculine appearance with that of an effeminate Greek, he draws particular attention to "his stiff Hispanian hair" (x. 65, 7).

His home was evidently one of rude comfort and plenty, sufficiently in the country to afford him the amusements of hunting and fishing, which he often recalls with keen pleasure, and sufficiently near the town to afford him the companionship of many comrades, the few survivors of whom he looks forward to meeting again after his thirty-four years' absence (x. 104). The memories of this old home, and of other spots, the rough names and local associations which he delights to introduce into his verse, attest to the simple pleasures of his early life and were among the influences which kept his spirit alive in the stultifying routines of upper-crust social life in Rome.

He was educated in Hispania, a part of the Roman Empire which in the 1st century produced several notable Latin writers, including Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger, Lucan and Quintilian, and Martial's contemporaries Licinianus of Bilbilis, Decianus of Emerita and Canius of Gades. Martial professes to be of the school of Catullus, Pedo, and Marsus. The epigram bears to this day the form impressed upon it by his unrivalled skill in wordsmithing.

Life in Rome
The success of his countrymen may have been what motivated Martial to move to Rome, from Hispania, once he had completed his education. This move occurred in AD 64. Seneca the Younger and Lucan may have served as his first patrons, but this is not known for sure.

Not much is known of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome. He published some juvenile poems of which he thought very little in his later years, and he chuckles at a foolish bookseller who would not allow them to die a natural death (I. 113). His faculty ripened with experience and with the knowledge of that social life which was both his theme and his inspiration; many of his best epigrams are among those written in his last years. From many answers which he makes to the remonstrances of friends—among others to those of Quintilian—it may be inferred that he was urged to practice at the bar, but that he preferred his own lazy, some would say Bohemian kind of life. He made many influential friends and patrons and secured the favor of both Titus and Domitian. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the semestris tribunatus, which conferred on him equestrian rank. Martial failed, however, in his application to Domitian for more substantial advantages, although he commemorates the glory of having been invited to dinner by him, and also the fact that he procured the privilege of citizenship for many persons on whose behalf he appealed to him.

The earliest of his extant works, known as Liber spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum in the reign of Titus. It relates to the theatrical performances given by him, but the book as it now stands was published about the first year of Domitian, i.e. about the year 81. The favour of the emperor procured him the countenance of some of the worst creatures at the imperial court—among them of the notorious Crispinus, and probably of Paris, the supposed author of Juvenal's exile, for whose monument Martial afterwards wrote a eulogistic epitaph. The two books, numbered by editors XIII and XIV, known by the names of Xenia and Apophoreta—inscriptions in two lines each for presents—were published at the Saturnalia of 84. In 86 he produced the first two of the twelve books on which his reputation rests.

From that time till his return to Hispania in 98 he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of Book X appeared in the reign of Domitian; Book XI. appeared at the end of 96, shortly after the accession of Nerva. A revised edition of book X, that which we now possess, appeared in 98, about the time of Trajan's entrance into Rome. The last book was written after three years' absence in Hispania, shortly before his death about the year 102 or 103.

These twelve books bring Martial's ordinary mode of life between the age of forty-five and sixty before us. His regular home for thirty-five years was the bustle of metropolitan Rome. He lived at first up three flights of stairs, and his "garret" overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He had a small villa and unproductive farm near Nomentum, in the Sabine territory, to which he occasionally retired from the pestilence, boors and noises of the city (ii. 38, xii. 57). In his later years he had also a small house on the Quirinal, near the temple of Quirinus.

At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to Cisalpine Gaul, in weariness, as he tells us, of his unprofitable attendance on the bigwigs of Rome. For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (iv. 25) he contemplates the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of Aquileia and the Timavus. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society was too great; even the epigrams sent from Forum Corneli and the Aemilian Way ring much more of the Roman forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos, brothels, market stalls, public houses, and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated.

His final departure from Rome was motivated by a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and apparently the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (x. 96); and he looks forward to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (xii. I 8) shows that for a time his ideal was happily realized; but the evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to Book XII proves and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome for long. The one consolation of his exile was a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather platonically as if she were his patroness—and it seems to have been a necessity of his life to always have a patron or patroness—rather than his wife or mistress.

During his life at Rome, although he never rose to a position of real independence, he seems to have known many writers of the time. In addition to Lucan and Quintilian, he numbered among his friends Silius Italicus, Juvenal and Pliny the Younger. Despite the two authors writing at the same time and having common friends, Martial and Statius are largely silent about one another, which may be explained by mutual dislike. Martial in many places shows an undisguised contempt for the artificial kind of epic on which Statius's reputation chiefly rests; and it is possible that the respectable author of the Thebaid and the Silvae felt little admiration for the life or the works of the bohemian epigrammatist.

Martial and his patrons
Martial was dependent on his wealthy friends and patrons for gifts of money, for his dinner, and even for his dress, but the relation of client to patron had been recognized as an honourable one by the best Roman traditions. No blame was attached to Virgil or Horace on account of the favours which they received from Augustus and Maecenas, or of the return which they made for these favours in their verse. That old honourable relationship, however, greatly changed during the time that passed between Augustus and Domitian. Men of good birth and education, and sometimes even of high official position (Juv. i. 117), accepted the dole (sportula). Martial was merely following a general fashion in paying his court to "a lord," and he made the best of the custom. In his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur, and to attend their morning levees. Later on, he went to his own small country house, near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative at the early visit.

Martial's character
Pliny the Younger, in the short tribute which he pays to him on hearing of his death, wrote, "He had as much good-nature as wit and pungency in his writings". Martial professes to avoid personalities in his satire, and honour and sincerity (fides and simplicitas) seem to have been the qualities which he most admires in his friends. Some have found distasteful his apparent servile flattery to the worst of the many bad emperors of Rome in the 1st century. These were emperors Martial would later censure immediately after their death (xii. 6). However, he seems to have disliked hypocrisy in its many forms, and seems to be free from cant, pedantry, or affectation of any kind.

Though many of his epigrams indicate a cynical disbelief in the female character, yet others prove that he could respect and almost revere a refined and courteous woman. His own life in Rome afforded him no experience of domestic virtue; but his epigrams show that, even in the age which is known to modern readers chiefly from the Satires of Juvenal, virtue was recognized as the purest source of happiness. The tenderest element in Martial's nature seems, however, to have been his affection for children and for his dependents.

Martial's Epigrams
Martial's keen curiosity and power of observation are manifested in his epigrams. The enduring literary interest of Martial's epigrams arises as much from their literary quality as from the colorful references to human life that they contain. Martial's epigrams bring to life the spectacle and brutality of daily life in imperial Rome, with which he was intimately connected.

From Martial, for example, we have a glimpse of his living conditions in the city of Rome:

As Jo-Ann Shelton has written, "fire was a constant threat in ancient cities because wood was a common building material and people often used open fires and oil lamps. However, some people may have deliberately set fire to their property in order to collect insurance money." Martial makes this accusation in one of his epigrams:

Martial also pours scorn on the doctors of his day:

Martial's epigrams also refer to the cruelty shown to slaves in Roman society. Below, he chides a man named Rufus for flogging his cook for a minor mistake:

Martial's epigrams are also characterized by their biting and often scathing sense of wit as well as for their lewdness; this has earned him a place in literary history as the original insult comic. Below is a sample of his more insulting work:

Or the following two examples (in translations by Mark Ynys-Mon):

Along with Roman graffiti, the Epigrams are important sources for Latin obscene words.

Reception
The works of Martial became highly valued on their discovery by the Renaissance, whose writers often saw them as sharing an eye for the urban vices of their own times. The poet's influence is seen in Juvenal, late classical literature, the Carolingian revival, the Renaissance in France and Italy, the Siglo de Oro, and early modern English and German poetry, until he became unfashionable with the growth of the Romantic movement.

The 21st century has seen a resurgence of scholarly attention to Martial's work.

Works

 * Works by Martial at Perseus Digital Library
 * Epigrammaton libri (in Latin) at The Latin Library.
 * Complete Epigrams (in English, 1897 edition) at The Tertullian Project—actually incomplete: scatological and sexually explicit material is left untranslated.
 * Martial Blog—translations from much of the first three books of Epigrams
 * Selected Epigrams translated by A. S. Kline
 * Selected Epigrams translated by Elizabeth Duke
 * Selected Epigrams in translation at Theatre of Pompey: 2:14; 6:9; 10:51; 11:1; 11:47; 14:29; 14:166
 * Some of Martial's more risqué Epigrams translated by Joseph S Salemi
 * Translations from Martial by Franklin P Adams
 * Translations in Simplified Chinese Characters

Other links

 * Poems by Martial at PoemHunter.com
 * Martial Quotations at The Quotations Page
 * SORGLL: Martial I.96, V.41, and X.30; read by Wakefield Foster
 * Court Poet & Pornographer Glen Bowersock on Martial from The New York Review of Books

title: Martial


text:
Robert Conquest

George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British-American historian, poet, and novelist. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books against Communism.

A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968); The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (1986); and Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991). He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.

Early life and education
Conquest was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to an American father, Robert Folger Wescott Conquest, and an English mother, Rosamund Alys Acworth. His father served in an American Ambulance Field Service unit with the French Army in World War I, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, with Silver Star in 1916.

Conquest was educated at Winchester College, where he won an exhibition to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Magdalen College, Oxford. He took a gap year, spending time at the University of Grenoble and in Bulgaria, and returning to Oxford in 1937, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Carlton Club. He was awarded an MA in PPE and a DLitt in history.

War years
In Lisbon on an American passport at the outbreak of the Second World War, Conquest returned to England. As the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war in 1939 as imperialist and capitalist, Conquest broke with it and was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on 20 April 1940, serving with the regiment until 1946.

In 1943 he was posted to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (later part of University College London) to study Bulgarian. The following year he was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, then to the Allied Control Commission. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia where he remained as the press officer. In 1948 he left Bulgaria when he was recalled to London under a minor diplomatic cloud after he had helped smuggle two Bulgarians out of the country.

Information Research Department
In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit created by the Labour Attlee government in order to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to democratic journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications." The IRD was also engaged in manipulating public opinion. Conquest was remembered there as a "brilliant, arrogant" figure who had 10 people reporting to him. He continued to work at the Foreign Office until 1956, becoming increasingly involved in the intellectual counter-offensive against communism.

In 1949 Conquest's assistant, Celia Kirwan (later Celia Goodman), approached George Orwell for information to help identify Soviet sympathisers. Orwell's list, discovered after her death in 2002, included Guardian and Observer journalists, as well as E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin. Conquest, like Orwell, fell for the beautiful Celia Kirwan, who inspired him to write several poems. One of his foreign office colleagues was Alan Maclean, brother of Donald Maclean, one of the Philby spy ring, who fled to Russia with Guy Burgess in 1951. When his brother defected, Alan resigned, then went to Macmillan and published a book of Conquest's poems. At the Foreign Office, Conquest wrote several papers that sowed the seeds for his later work. One, on the Soviet means of obtaining confessions, was elaborated on in The Great Terror. Other papers were "Peaceful Co-existence in Soviet Propaganda and Theory", and "United Fronts – a Communist Tactic". In 1950 Conquest served briefly as First Secretary in the British Delegation to the United Nations.

Writing
In 1956 Conquest left the Foreign Office and became a freelance writer and historian. After he left, he says, the Information Research Department (IRD) suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had gathered from Soviet publications into a book. During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work produced by the IRD, published in London by the Bodley Head as the Soviet Studies Series. Many of his Foreign Office works were published this way. In the United States, the material was republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by Frederick Praeger, who had previously published several books on communism at the request of the CIA, in addition to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Đilas, Howard Fast, and Charles Patrick Fitzgerald.

In 1962–1963 Conquest was literary editor of The Spectator, but he resigned when he found the job interfering with his historical writing. His first books on the Soviet Union were Common Sense About Russia (1960), The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960) and Power and Policy in the USSR (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961) and Russia After Khrushchev (1965).

The Great Terror (1968)
In 1968 Conquest published what became his best-known work, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939. Many reviewers at the time were not impressed by his way of writing about the Great Terror, which was in the tradition of "great men who make history". The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the period 1956–64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census.

The most important aspect of the book was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous narrow focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev, who were executed shortly thereafter. The question of why these leaders had pleaded guilty and confessed to various crimes at the trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of western writers, and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Conquest argued that the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges. By his estimates, Stalinist purges had led to the deaths of some 20 million people. He later stated that the total number of deaths could "hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million."

Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser, Bertolt Brecht, Owen Lattimore, and Romain Rolland, as well as American ambassador Joseph Davies, accusing them of being dupes of Stalin and apologists of his regime. Conquest cites various comments made by them where, he argues, they were denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.

After the opening up of the Soviet archives, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest's publisher asked him to expand and revise The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest's old friend, Sir Kingsley Amis. The new version was published in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment; ISBN 0-19-507132-8. The American historian J. Arch Getty disagreed, writing in 1993 that the archives did not support Conquest's casualty figures. In 1995, investigative journalist Paul Lashmar suggested that the reputation of prominent academics such as Robert Conquest was built upon work derived from material provided by the IRD. According to Denis Healey The Great Terror was an important influence, "but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them".

Many aspects of his book continue to be disputed by sovietologist historians and researchers on Russian and Soviet history, such as Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who insists that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are too high, even in his reassessments. In 2000, Michael Ignatieff, whose family had emigrated from Russia as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote "One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure." Conservative historian Paul Johnson, one of Thatcher's closest advisers, described Conquest as "our greatest living historian". And, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash, he was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin.

In 1996 Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who had been previously attacked by Conquest for his book Age of Extremes, praised Conquest's The Great Terror "as a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin Terror". However he expressed the view that this work and others were now to be considered obsolete "simply because the archival sources are now available". As a result, he wrote, there was no need for "fragmentary sources" and "guesswork". "[W]hen better or more complete data are available, they must take the place of poor and incomplete ones." In 2002 Conquest replied to his revisionist critics: ''"They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire."''

The Harvest of Sorrow (1986)
In 1986 Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Nevertheless, he wrote to them in a letter in 2003 that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."

Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)
For the Trotskyists, Kirov's murder was the Stalinist equivalent of the Reichstag fire, deliberately started by the Nazis to justify the arrest of German Communists. The Trotskyist-Menshevik view became the dominant one among western historians, popularised in Robert Conquest's influential books.

In The Great Terror, Conquest already undermined the official Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's inner circle, as the key to the mechanism of terror.

He returned to this in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), where he argued that Stalin not only sanctioned Kirov's assassination, but used it as a justification for the terror that culminated in 1937–38, though no evidence has been found to confirm Stalin's role in the murder.

Poems
In addition to his scholarly work, Conquest was a well-regarded poet whose poems have been published in various periodicals from 1937. In 1945 he was awarded the PEN Brazil Prize for his war poem "For the Death of a Poet" – about an army friend, the poet Drummond Allison, killed in Italy – and, in 1951, he received a Festival of Britain verse prize. During his lifetime, he had seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism published.

Conquest was a major figure in a prominent British literary circle known as "The Movement" which also included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Movement poets, many of whom bristled at being so labeled, rejected the experiments of earlier practitioners such as Ezra Pound.

He edited, in 1956 and 1962, the influential New Lines anthologies, introducing works by them, as well as Thom Gunn, Dennis Enright, and others, to a wider public. He spent 1959–60 as visiting poet at the University of Buffalo. Several of his poems were published in The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978; compiled by Amis), under the pseudonyms "Stuart Howard-Jones", "Victor Gray" and "Ted Pauker".

It emerged from the pages of poet Philip Larkin's published letters that Conquest and Larkin shared an enthusiasm for pornography in the 1950s. When Larkin was in Hull, Conquest sent him judicious selections of the latest pornography, and, when he came down to London, Conquest took him on shopping trips to the Soho porn shops. On one occasion Conquest, in 1957, wrote a letter to Larkin purporting to come from the Vice Squad which had found the poet's name on a pornographic publisher's list. Larkin panicked and went to see his solicitor, convinced that he was going to lose his job as librarian at Hull University, before Conquest owned up. The true story of the joke became in 2008, Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, a comedy radio play by Chris Harrald.

Soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn met with Conquest, asking him to translate a 'little' poem of his into English verse. This was "Prussian Nights" – nearly two thousand lines in ballad metre – published in 1977.

A new Collected Poems, edited by Elizabeth Conquest, was published in March 2020 by the Waywiser Press.

Novels
Conquest had been a member of the British Interplanetary Society since the 1940s, and shared Amis's taste for science fiction. Starting from 1961, the two writers jointly edited Spectrum, five anthologies of new sci-fi writing. Conquest also proposed to Amis a collaboration based on a draft comic novel that Conquest had completed. This was revised by Amis, then it appeared under both their names as The Egyptologists (1965). The novel is about a secret Egyptological London society that is really a husbands' organization serving as an alibi for philanderers. A reviewer in The New York Times felt that their "elaborate little jokes leave an unpleasant taste".

Later a film version of the novel was cancelled when its star, Peter Sellers, was called away to Hollywood. Conquest published a science-fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955).

What to Do When the Russians Come (1984)
In 1984, Robert Conquest wrote, with Jon Manchip White, the fictional book What to Do When the Russians Come: a Survivor's Guide which, however, was intended to be a real survival manual in case of Soviet invasion. This book, as many other works of the mid-1980s in different media, like Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, the movie Red Dawn, and the Milton Bradley game Fortress America, starts from the premise that a Soviet ground-invasion of the United States could be imminent and that the Soviet Union was about to engulf the world.

"It is widely accepted that the United States now faces a real possibility of succumbing to the power of an alien regime unless the right policies are pursued. [This book's aim] is, first, to show the American citizen clearly and factually what the results of this possible Soviet domination could be and how it would affect him or her personally; and second, to give some serious advice on how to survive.'"

Conquest supported the Reagan defense buildup and asked for an increase of expenses on US defense budget, claiming that in the nuclear field NATO was only possibly matching USSR military power:

We live in dangerous times. Such miscalculations are very possible. But they are not inevitable. The American people and their representatives have it in their power to prevent their country from undergoing the ordeal we have described. A democratic government, with all its distractions and disadvantages, ... It is not infallible, it is slow to learn, and it is willing to grasp at comfortable illusions; but it may yet act decisively"

"But why should we fear that such an ordeal may face us? The economic potential of the West in gross national product is far greater than that of the Soviet Union....In fact, the Soviet Union is economically far behind the United States. American technology is always a generation ahead of theirs. They have to turn to the United States for wheat. The Soviet economy is at a dead end. The Communist system has failed to win support in any of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet idea has no attractions. On any calculation—of economic power or social advance or intellectual progress there could be no question of the Russians imposing their will. But in terms of actual military power, the West's advantage does not seem to have been made use of. It is at least matched, and many would say overmatched, in the nuclear field; the Western forces in Europe have less than half the striking power of their opponents. It is no good our being more advanced than they are if this is not translated into power—both military power and political willpower."

In 1986 Conquest affirmed that "a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn't so much whether they're good or bad, exactly; they're not bad or good as we'd be bad or good. It's far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us."

Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a book devoted to the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.

There is much more in this book about communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest's greater expertise on communism, and partly because comparatively few Western intellectuals became Nazis. He focuses mainly on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became communists because they felt or believed that this was "anti-fascism" or "anti-Nazism".

Laws of politics
Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations:
 * 1) Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.
 * 2) Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

Conquest's first and second law are attested by at least two sources. On 14 February 2003, Andrew Brown wrote of Conquest's campaign against the expansion of university education that "[f]rom this period dates 'Conquest's Law', which states that 'Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands'. This was later supplemented with the balancing rule that every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents." In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.' (The Second Law, more recent, says, 'Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.')"

On 25 June 2003, John Derbyshire wrote in the National Review Online's blog The Corner that "[a]s best I can remember", Conquest conjectured three laws of politics:
 * 1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
 * 2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
 * 3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Derbyshire commented: "Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service." For these statements, Conquest would become well known among certain thinkers, especially online conservatives; however, Derbyshire cited no source for them and implied his memory was not certain on the matter. Indeed, the second law given here is O'Sullivan's first law, which was stated by John O'Sullivan in his article "O'Sullivan's First Law" in the 27 October 1989 print issue of the National Review, in which he also references Derbyshire's Conquest's third law as Conquest's second law: "That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):

The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Examples: virtually any conservative party anywhere, the Ronald Lauder for Mayor campaign, and the British secret service. That last example is, however, flawed, since the British secret service actually was controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies in the form of Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al. In which case, Conquest's Law should have operated to make M1-6 [sic] a crack anti-Soviet intelligence service of James Bond proportions. But these are deep waters."

Personal life
Conquest was married four times, first in 1942 to Joan Watkins, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1948. There followed a marriage to Tatiana Mihailova (1948–1962), whom he had helped escape from Bulgaria. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1951. In 1962 he married Caroleen MacFarlane; they divorced in 1978. That year he began dating Elizabeth Neece Wingate, a lecturer in English and the daughter of a United States Air Force colonel. He and Wingate married in 1979. When he died in 2015, he had several grandchildren from his sons and stepdaughter.

Later life

In 1981 Conquest moved to California to take up a post as Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator of the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he remained a Fellow. In 1985 he signed a petition in support of the anti-Communist Contras (Nicaragua). He was a fellow of the Columbia University's Russian Institute, and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a distinguished visiting scholar at The Heritage Foundation; a research associate of Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. In 1990 he presented Red Empire, a seven-part mini-series on the Soviet Union produced by Yorkshire Television.

Conquest died in 2015 in Stanford, California, at the age of 98, of respiratory failure as a result of Parkinson's disease.

Awards and honors
Conquest was a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and the British Interplanetary Society, and a Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

His honours include
 * Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005)
 * Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG; 1996)
 * Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE; 1955])
 * Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2009)
 * Estonian Cross of Terra Mariana (2008)
 * Ukrainian Order of Yaroslav Mudryi (2005).
 * Hearing Secret Harmonies, by Anthony Powell, the final volume in Powell's 12 volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is dedicated to Conquest.
 * A street in (the Ukrainian city of) Dnipro was renamed after Robert Conquest in February 2024

His awards include:
 * Selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 1993 Jefferson Lecture (the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities)
 * Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters (1999)
 * Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts & Letters,1997)
 * Dan David Prize (2012).
 * Conquest was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
 * Antonovych prize (1987)

Selected works
Historical and political

 * Common Sense About Russia (1960)
 * Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R.: The Study of Soviet Dynastics (1961)
 * The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1960)
 * Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (1961)
 * Russia After Khrushchev (1965)
 * The Politics of Ideas in the USSR (1967)
 * Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (1967)
 * Industrial Workers in the USSR (1967)
 * Agricultural Workers in the USSR (1968)
 * Religion in the U.S.S.R. (1968)
 * The Soviet Political System (1968)
 * The Soviet Police System (1968)
 * Justice and the Legal System in the U.S.S.R. (1968)
 * The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
 * The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990)
 * The Great Terror: 40th Anniversary Edition (2008)
 * Where Marx Went Wrong (1970)
 * The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)
 * The Human Cost of Soviet Communism (Prepared for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1970)
 * V.I. Lenin (1972)
 * The Russian Tradition (with Tibor Szamuely, 1974)
 * Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1979)
 * Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy (1979)
 * We & They: Civic & Despotic Cultures (1980)
 * The Man-made Famine in Ukraine (with James Mace, Michael Novak and Dana Dalrymple, 1984)
 * What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide (with Jon Manchip White, 1984)
 * Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939 (1985)
 * The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
 * The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (1986)
 * Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989)
 * Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989)
 * Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991)
 * History, Humanity, and Truth (1993)
 * Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)
 * The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, W. W. Norton & Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2

Journal articles
 * The Limits of Detente. Foreign Affairs, 46(4), pp. 733–742.
 * Stalin's Successors. (1970) Foreign Affairs, 48(3), pp. 509–524.
 * A New Russia? A New World? (1975) Foreign Affairs, 53(3), pp. 482–497.
 * Revisionizing Stalin's Russia. (1987) The Russian Review, 46(4), pp.386-390.
 * Academe and the Soviet Myth. (1993) The National Interest, 31, pp. 91–98.
 * Toward an English-Speaking Union. (1999) The National Interest, (57), pp. 64–70.
 * Downloading Democracy. (2004) The National Interest, (78), pp. 29–32.

Poetry
 * Poems (1956)
 * Back to Life: Poems from behind the Iron Curtain as translator/editor (1958)
 * Between Mars and Venus (1962)
 * Arias from a Love Opera, and Other Poems (1969)
 * Forays (1979)
 * New and Collected Poems (1988)
 * Demons Don't (1999)
 * Penultimata (2009)
 * A Garden of Erses [limericks, as Jeff Chaucer] (2010)
 * Blokelore and Blokesongs (2012)

Novels
 * A World of Difference (1955)
 * The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis, 1965)

Criticism
 * The Abomination of Moab (1979)

title: Robert Conquest


text:
Min (god)

Min (Egyptian mnw ) is an ancient Egyptian god whose cult originated in the predynastic period (4th millennium BCE). He was represented in many different forms, but was most often represented in male human form, shown with an erect penis which he holds in his right hand and an upheld left arm holding a "flail".

Myths and function
Min's cult began and was centered around Coptos (Koptos) and Akhmim (Panopolis) of upper Egypt, where in his honour great festivals were held celebrating his "coming forth" with a public procession and presentation of offerings. His other associations include the eastern desert and links to the god Horus. Flinders Petrie excavated two large statues of Min at Qift which are now in the Ashmolean Museum and it is thought by some that they are pre-dynastic. Although not mentioned by name, a reference to "he whose arm is raised in the East" in the Pyramid Texts is thought to refer to Min.

His importance grew in the Middle Kingdom when he became even more closely linked with Horus as the deity Min-Horus. By the New Kingdom he was also fused with Amun in the form of Min-Amun, who was also the serpent Irta, a kamutef (the "bull of his mother" - a god who fathers himself with his own mother ). Min as an independent deity was also a kamutef of Isis. One of Isis's many places of cult throughout the valley was at Min's temple in Koptos as his divine wife. Min's shrine was crowned with a pair of bull horns.

As the central deity of fertility and possibly orgiastic rites, Min became identified by the Greeks with the god Pan. One feature of Min worship was the wild prickly lettuce Lactuca serriola – the domestic version of which is Lactuca sativa (lettuce) – which has aphrodisiac and opiate qualities and produces latex when cut, possibly identified with semen. He also had connections with Nubia. However, his main centers of worship remained at Coptos and Akhmim (Khemmis).

Male deities as vehicles for fertility and potency rose to prevalence at the emergence of widespread agriculture. Male Egyptians would work in agriculture, making bountiful harvests a male-centered occasion. Thus, male gods of virility such as Osiris and Min were more developed during this time. Fertility was not associated with solely women, but with men as well, even increasing the role of the male in childbirth. As a god of male sexual potency, he was honoured during the coronation rites of the New Kingdom, when the Pharaoh was expected to sow his seed—generally thought to have been plant seeds. At the beginning of the harvest season, his image was taken out of the temple and brought to the fields in the festival of the departure of Min, the Min Festival, when they blessed the harvest, and played games naked in his honour, the most important of these being the climbing of a huge (tent) pole. This four day festival is evident from the great festivals list at the temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu.

Cult and worship in the predynastic period surrounding a fertility god was based upon the fetish of fossilized belemnite. Later symbols widely used were the white bull, a barbed arrow, and a bed of lettuce, that the Egyptians believed to be an aphrodisiac. Egyptian lettuce was tall, straight, and released a milk-like sap when rubbed, characteristics superficially similar to the penis. Lettuce was sacrificially offered to the god, then eaten by men in an effort to achieve potency. Later pharaohs would offer the first fruits of harvest to the god to ensure plentiful harvest, with records of offerings of the first stems of sprouts of wheat being offered during the Ptolemaic period.

Civilians who were not able to formally practice the cult of Min paid homage to the god as sterility was an unfavorable condition looked upon with sorrow. Concubine figurines, ithyphallic statuettes, and ex-voto phalluses were placed at entrances to the houses of Deir el-Medina to honor the god in hopes of curing the disability. Egyptian women would touch the penises of statues of Min in hopes of pregnancy, a practice still continued today.

Appearance
In Egyptian art, Min is depicted as an anthropomorphic male deity with a masculine body, covered in shrouds, wearing a crown with feathers, and often holding his erect penis in his left hand and a "flail" that is possibly a stylised form of flail (referring to his authority, or rather that of the Pharaohs) in his upward facing right hand. Around his forehead, Min wears a red ribbon that trails to the ground, claimed by some to represent sexual energy. The legs are bandaged because of his chthonic force, in the same manner as Ptah and Osiris. His skin was usually painted black, which symbolized the fertile soil of the Nile.

Family
In Hymn to Min it is said:

"Min, Lord of the Processions, God of the High Plumes, Son of Osiris and Isis, Venerated in Ipu..."

Min's wives were Iabet and Repyt (Repit).

Isis is the mother of Min as well as his wife.

Ejaculation legend
There have been controversial suggestions, by authors such as British journalist Jonathan Margolis, that the pharaoh was expected to demonstrate, as part of a Min festival, that he could ejaculate—and thus ensure the annual flooding of the Nile. No hard evidence of this exists, according to Egyptologists Kara Cooney, professor of ancient Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA, and her colleague Jonathan Winnerman. This myth may have originated from a misinterpretation of a different festival.

title: Min (god)