Cleopatra Sleeps Siesta
Sunday, May 07, 2017
Brother Hubert Koeppen, C.S.C. taught me to love history.
Brother Francis Barrett, C.S.C did the same with American History. To this day
I know my stuff but I also live what they taught me.
Brother Hubert in particular made every day of world history
seem like he was telling us a story. These stories about the past seemed to
have relevance to the present we were living. I remember one story in
particular involving the Theban poet Pindar and Alexander (not yet the great)
The facts courtesy of Wikipedia are these:
Pindar's house in Thebes became one of the city's
landmarks. Alexander the Great demolished the city as punishment for its
resistance to Macedonian expansionism but he left the house intact out of
gratitude for verses praising his ancestor, king Alexander I of Macedon.
The story that Brother Hubert told us was that Alexander
went to Pindar’s house and found the poet taking a sunbath in his outdoor
bathtub. Alexander told him who he was and how he had saved the house from
demolition. It seems that Pindar said something like, “Can you move out of the
sun’s way sir. I am taking a sunbath.” Then Alexander said, “If I were not
Alexander I would be you.”
In my two trips to London I could not help but thinking that at any moment I might not cross with the ghost of Julius Caesar. In Granada seeing the little lead coffins of the Catholic Kings (Ferdinand and Isabella) made them as real as Brother Hubert's stories about them.
In my two trips to London I could not help but thinking that at any moment I might not cross with the ghost of Julius Caesar. In Granada seeing the little lead coffins of the Catholic Kings (Ferdinand and Isabella) made them as real as Brother Hubert's stories about them.
This Fujiroid peel negative (reversed in Photoshop) I
immediately associated with the idea of Cleopatra having a nap.
