Re: Venus the Black

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Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 30 Jul 2020, 15:45 isle of Cranae in Laconia, there was a temple of Venus, which Paris had built after the abduction of Helen, to perpetuate the transport of his joy and his recognition; that he gave to this Venus the epithet of Migonitis, and named the territory Migonion with a word which signified the gallant adventure which had passed there. ...Venus Melaenis, or the Black, also had a temple in a fauxbourg of Corinth; it was she who appeared in a dream to the Courtisan Laïs,[/b] [/i]
Nice digging and surely that is the only "Black Venus" ...my hesitation is the Trojan prince Paris is not the direct ancestor (Anchises and Aeneas are) and neither Cranae nor Corinth, as far as I know, have anything to do with Aeneas' peregrinations (which feature Dido, not Laïs). Seems like some odd classical research for the early 15th century....for an obscure detail that provides what illumination about the genealogy? But there she is, black-faced....

I haven't looked at Bernal's work in forever, and even though his project is to find the etymological links between ancient Egypt and Greece, he is bound to have any and all references to a Black Athena - the very title of his work: Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1), 1987.

Forget the "fabrication" dates of his historiographical focus of 1785-1985 in volume I - he relies heavily on in-depth cultural linguistics going back to the pre-dynastic period; and also forget that his work is highly controversial - he has classical sources about references to a black Athena or he doesn't (I'll see if I can dredge up his books - most of my classical era-focused books are in storage to make room for other interests).

He was quite the phenom while I was in college - even heard him speak at my school and asked him a question afterwards - but I think he was three decades too early; he'd be a rock star if this book came out today. But I see he died in 2013....

Re: Venus the Black

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Phaeded wrote: 30 Jul 2020, 17:08 Nice digging and surely that is the only "Black Venus" ...my hesitation is the Trojan prince Paris is not the direct ancestor (Anchises and Aeneas are) and neither Cranae nor Corinth, as far as I know, have anything to do with Aeneas' peregrinations (which feature Dido, not Laïs). Seems like some odd classical research for the early 15th century....for an obscure detail that provides what illumination about the genealogy? But there she is, black-faced....
No, but Paris has nothing to do with the Black Venus; Gerard de la Chau only mentions the epithets Migonitis and Melaenis together because both occur in Pausanias.

The important point is that we don't know the artist of the St Petersburg Semideus genealogy (the only one) , or the precise date. Although De Hamel cites "Anna Melograni, art historian of the Italian Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, who has devoted her life to the study of fifteeth-century illumination in Lombardy" (p. 501), as saying with certainty that the illuminations on the St. Peterburg Semideus (which is book III alone) cannot be as late as 1438, and are comparable to the artist of the Copenhagen Boccaccio De Mulieribus claris of 1401 (catalogue number GKS 2092 kvart - it is not online that I can find). She was willing to go as late as 1430. The dedication to Filippo Maria was written in 1438, though, and it mentions the genealogy, so this genealogy must date to 1438. De Hamel believes that the book III itself was written earlier, however, before Sacco thought to dedicate it to Filippo Maria.

But Michelino doesn't paint Venus black, so we aren't talking about some family legend here; it may be new and ad hoc, for some other reason. It is interesting to imagine that Filippo Maria continued to develop the family mythology, and made this suggestion. But Pausanias and Athenaeus were barely known in the 1420s, and only in Greek, so the people who could have discussed this with him are few.

I showed from Boccaccio earlier that Venus Melaenis wasn't known to him in his account of the third Venus, book XI, 4.
He was quite the phenom while I was in college - even heard him speak at my school and asked him a question afterwards - but I think he was three decades too early; he'd be a rock star if this book came out today. But I see he died in 2013....
Me too, I started in 1986 at York University. Bernal was omnipresent. I was too undeveloped to make much of it. But rather than superstar today, I think it is due to him in large part that we are where we are today.
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Re: Venus the Black

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Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 30 Jul 2020, 17:28
He was quite the phenom while I was in college - even heard him speak at my school and asked him a question afterwards - but I think he was three decades too early; he'd be a rock star if this book came out today. But I see he died in 2013....
Me too, I started in 1986 at York University. Bernal was omnipresent. I was too undeveloped to make much of it. But rather than superstar today, I think it is due to him in large part that we are where we are today.
I was post-grad (floating between programs deciding what to do with my life) so I must be four years or so older than you. I sort of regret my joke to him - after his talk I told him his project was "Oedipal", since his father was an Egyptologist and he was upsetting that discipline's very foundations (Bernal the son was originally an Asian linguist). He looked a bit shocked and said "I never thought of it that way before" but then he thankfully laughed.,

Re: What are the documents for Marziano's dates?

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I was born in 1966. I had two years out of high school before going to college.

Your comment to him was good then. I've met a few of my scholarly heroes, I even bumped into Alan Dershowitz in Harvard Yard once. Literally, we were both talking to ourselves and rammed into each other. Just apologies, I recognized him, but I wasn't in law, so we just continued on. This was in 92 or 93, so well before he got the kind of notoriety he has now.
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Re: What are the documents for Marziano's dates?

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Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 30 Jul 2020, 17:54 I was born in 1966. I had two years out of high school before going to college.
Closer in age than I thought - December '63 for me, on an air force base in W. Germany (couple weeks after Kennedy got shot - my dad was on "high alert" or whatever, his interceptor squadron still ready to scramble as they weren't sure if the Soviets were behind the assassination and something else was up).

Re: What are the documents for Marziano's dates?

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Phaeded wrote: 30 Jul 2020, 18:12
Closer in age than I thought - December '63 for me, on an air force base in W. Germany (couple weeks after Kennedy got shot - my dad was on "high alert" or whatever, his interceptor squadron still ready to scramble as they weren't sure if the Soviets were behind the assassination and something else was up).
You must have mixed feelings about Trump's decision yesterday. Or maybe not mixed at all.

Of course I'd assume that your birth had nothing to do with the atmosphere at the time, unless it were premature because of stress on your mother, worried about your father's perhaps imminent call to arms.

I just looked up Kennedy's speech in Berlin, to see if it might have had anything to do with your conception, but no, it was in June of 1963.
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Re: What are the documents for Marziano's dates?

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Here's a better version of the Corinthian Laïs coin shown above, from Ennio Quiriino Visconti (1751-1818) Iconographie grecque ou recueil des portraits authentiques des empereurs, rois, et hommes illustres de l'antiquité, volume I, Milan, 1824, plate XXXVII, 2. First edition was 1811, but it doesn't have the plates.
https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/visconti1824ga - three volumes of 1824-1826 edition.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100912626 - three volumes of 1811-1817 edition.





Laïs of Corinth was first a slave-girl from Sicily, then became the most famous whore in Corinth, legendary for her beauty, the fame of the men who would (or would not) sleep with her, and the astronomical prices she charged. She moved to Thessalonica, where the jealous townswomen killed her by stoning, despite her now-advanced age. One of Plato's epigrams says she was a devotee of Aphrodite, and she consecrated her mirror (a rare thing in those days) to her. I suppose this implies divination with the mirror. She had a dream in which Aphrodite Melaine or Venus Melaenis appeared and prophesied very rich lovers for her. From this it appears that the legend conflates Plato's Aphrodite with the dream of the Black Aphrodite, to say that she was devoted to the Black Aphrodite. Perhaps also that Laïs became herself a living embodiment of Aphrodite. Since she was from Sicily, perhaps she was very dark. Here I am speculating. I really have found no way to connect this story to the Visconti genealogy of Semideus. That is, the only two authors who mention this Black Venus are Pausanias and Athenaeus, and I have yet to find a hint of them in Liber III of Semideus.

I am left with the conjecture that the artist invented her, maybe at the suggestion of Catone Sacco, for some reason. But neither Anchises nor Aeneas had anything to do with Corinth, or Thessaly, or Boeotia, as far as I know.

Okay, there's a connection. I just looked at Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, who says of Anchises:
The place of Anchises' death (he was eighty years old when he left Troy) is attributed to different sites by various writers. Sometimes his grave is said to be on Ida itself where he had once looked after the flocks; alternatively it is placed near the peninsula of Pallene in Macedonia, in Arcadia, in Epirus, in southern Italy, and on Cape Drepanon in Sicily.
Pallene is Thessalonian, Corinth is generally considered in Arcadia, I believe, and Epirus is on the Balkan coast in the west.

Drepanon, or Drepanum, is of course the canonical account in the Aeneid (III, last lines).
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Re: What are the documents for Marziano's dates?

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Well here's something on Anchises from La Chau again (the book is on Google books and Archive, but the best quality is the Heidelberg site - https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/digli ... u1776/0047 ).





The coin shows Anchises and Aphrodite. What is more, Ilium is a name for Epirus, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_(Epirus) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cestria_(Epirus) Of course "Ilium" is itself the alternative name for Troy.
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