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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (42243)	11/19/1999 8:34:00 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

First things first... You can be my little brother any old time...;-}> And yep, my dad was a good dad... he just hung the mask on the doorknob for my brother's own good... Little did he know that he had somehow created a shift in the balance of good and evil in our domain... and that it would require a form of ritual to set things right.... (there's a little Leslie Silko "Ceremony" or "Almanac of the Dead" type thinking for you...). Now, let's move on to the Greek stuff... I believe that you remembered most of this quite accurately... Most of the gold was found in the tholos tombs at Mycenae... The tombs were first thought to be treasuries... The Treasury of Atreus which you have mentioned...and the gold mask is known as the Mask of Agamemnon... The fortresses of the Myceneans at Mycenae and Tiryns were built of stone so massive that later Greeks believed that they were built by giants... Cyclopean fortresses... Now, it is I that was a little sloppy when I mentioned the golden cups...the Vaphio cups...came from Sparta...not from Mycenae... and then there was the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, known to us from the Iliad...the great storehouse with its clay tablets describing his possessions... But yes, then there are the Minoans... The palace of Knossos on Crete... And you are right, the art was wonderful... fluid...exciting... and the palace more of an unprotected villa... not a fortress... Can you imagine what life would have been like there... However, I've always been particularly fascinated by the Etruscans... off by themselves in Tuscany, but with so many interesting ties to Greek culture... Their tomb paintings... resembling both the Minoan frescoes, but also seeming like large-scale scenes from a Greek vase... and the sarcophagi..with men and women reclining together... wonderful... BTW, here's a little story for you regarding Greek art.... A few years ago, I was working on a paper about the relationship between Greek red and black-figure vases and Etruscan wall paintings. On this particular evening, I was sitting on a big comfortable armchair in the university library. The armchairs are arranged in intimate little groups scattered here and there throughout the library. So, there I sat, flipping through some big tome on Greek vases,... I forget the title, but it was some massive, stodgy thing... fine, thin paper...hundreds of pages with plates depicting perhaps every Greek vase known to modern man... Around me were a few other students... serious students working late into a Friday evening, instead of off downing pints at the university pub. We sat very quietly, each of us studying our chosen books...and I, just flipping along through the pages, looking for any vases with an uncanny resemblance to an Etruscan tomb paintings. Then...all of a sudden.. I turned a page only to be confronted by at least a dozen of those low drinking cups... I think they are called kylix,...but these weren't your ordinary garden-variety kylix cups... No...these cups probably belonged to some Greek party animal... for these were decorated with some of the most unusual erotica which I have encountered in my art history wanderings... I'm not quite sure why I reacted as I did... perhaps it was the slight "shock" of encountering some pretty steamy erotica after flipping through pages and pages of very tame vase paintings of wrestlers or gods and goddesses... Perhaps it was just the absolute silence of the almost deserted library, or maybe it was the studiousness of everyone around me... or perhaps it was just a case of my always carefully suppressed silliness taking advantage of the situation and "making a break for it" all of sudden,...well, whatever,... I tried to stifle my laughter, but it was pointless... a lost cause... There I was, in the midst of a terrible laughing jag... now the center of attention... a dozen sombre eyes, staring at me over their reading glasses... me... embarrassed... unable to stop laughing... unwilling to explain the reason for my sudden outburst... I actually had to get up and leave... ...goodness... nothing quite like making a spectacle of yourself...;-}>