#the 1 million is a hyperbolic btw

[pepperoni-soda]

Okay so uhm…I deleted TikTok for reasons and forgot that you can’t redownload it yet…so like. I’m just going to hang out here a lot more now.

Expect a 1 million word long essay on why Ralph breaks the internet sucks btw

Soon…soon…

[jeannereames]

Hii Dr. Reames, I hope you're having a good day.

I've seen the claim several times that Hephaistion's funeral was the most expensive (or one of the most expensive) in history or at least of its time, how true is that? I'm curious to know how much money Alexander spent and how much that amount would be equivalent to today

Hephaistion's Funeral

Making comparisons between ancient and modern costs is tricky because it's not one-to-one. Accounts say Alexander spent 10 or 12-thousand talents on Hephaistion's funeral. It doesn't specify of gold or silver, but silver is probably to be assumed if gold isn't specified. As of today (12/7/24), a gram of silver is worth $1.00, US, and an Attic talent is estimated at about 26 kilograms. I'm using Attic, although archaeologists DO actually know the silver weight for Macedonia in Alexander's reign...but I'm not sure where to find that (without a lot of digging), so Attic will do as an estimate; it won't be enormously far off.

26,000 grams of silver = 1 Attic talent. Multiplying that, we get $260,000,000 for 10,000 talents.

BUT the real question is what will that buy? That's why one-to-one conversion is meaningless. For instance, a cheap t-shirt in the US is under $10, more if specialized or nice soft cotton...but a cheap wool garment (chiton) in Classical Athens was about 20 drachmai or 10 days' wages. Linen was at least twice that. (Why clothes were made at home.) The standard wage for a skilled laborer was 2 drachmai a day. A single talent = 6000 drachma, so a skilled laborer earned a talent in a little over 8 years, if he worked every day, 8.5 if he took off for holidays.

(An article on the cost of common items in Classical Athens.)

So, Hephaistion's funeral (low-end) cost the equivalent of 1 year's wages for 80,000 people, or the entire population of Kalamazoo, Michigan (minus temp college students), and then some. Or you could buy 13 million wool chitones. The entire population of modern Greece in 2023 was not-quite 10.5 million.

Whether that's the most expensive funeral in history, I don't know that we have the data to say...so avoid hyperbole. We CAN say it was hella costly.

BUT I'd also caution that we must take these numbers with a grain of salt--just like the supposed cost of Boukephalas, Alexander's famous warhorse, at 13 talents. Whatever the funeral actually cost, it almost certainly didn't cost 10K talents, much less 12K.

By the Roman era, Hephaistion's funeral had become the ne plus ultra of "excessive grieving" = lack of sophrosune/self-control = A BAD THING. The "moral of the story" was that, in his final years, Alexander had lost it...excessive wealth leading to complete immoderation. IOW, Alexander the Great = Elon Musk.

It's also important to point out that, whatever it did cost, Alexander was not the sole donor. Both people and cities in the empire sent money, some to honor Hephaistion, others to avoid Alexander's ire or to gain his favor. We have no way of knowing what percentages were, but it's worth noting a general outpouring of financial contributions.

There is also disagreement as to whether the whole thing went to his funeral pyre, or to a monument (like the Mausoleum), or to a mixture of monument and pyre. I'll go with door #3, btw.

Whatever it was doesn't seem to have been fully completed by Alexander's own death, 9-10 months later. Diodoros gives us our fullest description, but he may have been working from plans, not the completed structure.

(Sketch below: Quatremere de Quincy, publ. on Magasin Pittoresque, Paris, 1849, available from Getty Images.)

[appalachiafreeman]

Ignorance is the cause of much suffering.

Price inflation is the result or three things only:

1) supply vs. demand. The demand for the product outstrips the available supply. Prices increase (inflate). Profit per sale may remain static but often increase.

2) Cost of production increases. It's costs more to create the product. Therefore, the price charged to the consumer increases. Profit per sale may remain static but often decrease.

3) Purchasing power of currency (value) decreases. Therefore the required amount of currency to purchase the product increases. Profits per sale usually remain static, but value of the profit decreases along with value of currency.

Macro inflation usually involves two of these factors. In the current western economy, where private central banks print fiat currency and sell it to nations, the purchasing power of the currency declines along an expected rate. The purchasing power of the US dollar has lost >98% of its purchasing power since the establishment of the FED in 1913. Gold, on the other hand, has retained >98% of its purchasing power in the same time frame.

Since 2021, trillions of dollars have been purchased by the US government and printed by the FED, then put into circulation. This has had the predictable effect of increasing the supply of US dollars available, thus lowering the purchasing power of each dollar.

Added to that, the increase in labor pay (in the hopes of offsetting the harm caused by price inflation) increased the production cost of products for sale. The result is higher pay has not increased the purchasing power of the average worker, therefore has not improved their lot. The fact is that the devaluation of the dollar and increased production costs have resulted in a worse financial position for most working and middle-class folk.

Even the "evil" CEO has felt the pinch... the loss of purchasing power has made their millions less valuable and means their luxury costs more and is less sustainable. Being a billionaire when a loaf of bread costs millions means nothing. This has happened in the recent past and is not hyperbole.

The solution is not higher wages paid in fiat currency controlled by independent banks, as they can and will devalue that currency by practice, if not design.

The solution is to fix the currency.. tie it to a tangible commodity with a set supply and the printing of currency tied to actual commodity held by the printing government. In short: End the FED. End fiat currency. End fractional reserve banking. Then, set wages based on labor value.

BTW, "price controls" always result in state owned slaves. Those "essentials" still require labor and material to produce. The material requires labor to acquire or produce. All along the supply chain, that essential product required a person's labor.

In our society, that labor is voluntary and paid as a cost of production. That cost is figured into the final sale price. To control the final price of that essential product requires that the production cost be controlled. That means the labor cost required to aquire the raw material and produce the final product has to be controlled. That means the laborers can not negotiate their labor rate or refuse to work.

They must sell their labor at the rate determined by the state. If they defy the state and refuse to provide their labor, the system will fall apart, so the state will need to use force to require that labor.

This is the basic truth that all neo-marxists miss.. also the reason every Marxist-socialist-communist state has failed or adapted the theory to incorporate more capitalism into their economic models to survive. Marxism will always result in a totalitarian state propped up by defacto slavery. A dictatorship of the Proletariat is still a dictatorship.

[catilinas]

Hi! I haven't been following you for long and I'm just starting to get into The Aeneid. Could you explain what you and the other anon meant when you said everyone in The Aeneid is a double of Aeneas? Like who and how? If you decide to answer could you link articles about it too if it's possible (because I'm kinda confused lol)?

the aeneid is (clearly. from its name) a poem about aeneas, so it would be surprising to me if there was any character who didn’t reflect some aspect of aeneas at least a little bit. it is hyperbolic though to say Every Character Is A Double Of Aeneas etc. or is it. eye emoji. there are definitely some characters who are More Blatantly doing doubling things like this Has Been Observed.

most noticeable is (as the other anon was talking about!) turnus. plotwise aeneas and turnus are doubles in that they are both rivals for lavinia. imo the aeneas-turnus doubling starts as soon as the sibyl’s prophecy in book 6 that in italy aeneas will ‘find a simois, a xanthus, and greek camps. in latium you’ll find a new achilles, he too a goddess’ son’ (aeneid 6.88-90 trans. bartsch) LIKE this is saying turnus will be achilles 2.0 But Also aeneas is invading italy! where the sybil says this new trojan landscape is! by taking the role of invader of a trojan landscape aeneas is also framed as a new achilles, and turnus takes the role of trojan defender i.e. what aeneas once Was! and the idea that turnus embodies an earlier (and trojan = not roman yet = defeatable) aeneas is then like. really obvious. e.g. juno tricking turnus into fleeing the battlefield to safety in book 10 as aphrodite saving aeneas from battle in the iliad. there is also the Very Famous parallel in the moment of turnus’ death where ‘ast illi solvuntur frigore membra’ ‘turnus’ knees buckled with chill’ (aeneid 12.951 trans. bartsch) repeats the line that introduced aeneas in book 1 ‘aeneae solvuntur frigore membra’ ‘aeneas’ knees buckled with chill’ (aeneid 1.92 trans. bartsch). what the fuck is going on there. like yes turnus is a weaker (and doomed) aeneas as he dies but also aeneas kills him while succumbing to furor i.e. the force/emotion consistently associated with turnus… like ok you could read it as aeneas overcoming the role of conquered trojan and becoming a hashtag victorious proto-roman via getting someone else to fill his previous role (ritual substitution on main) BUT aeneas killing turnus still ends up looking weirdly like self-sacrifice. and then the academics scream about The Ending Of The Aeneid for One Million Years.

also cool and sexy is that dido is doubled w aeneas!!! this one is kinda an obvious parallel like they are both rulers in exile. they both have dead spouses. they both want to found cities. and alas those cities are destined to be Sworn Foes :( my favourite detail of the aeneas-dido doubling though is vergil being cool and sexy w the verb ‘errare’ (to wander / to Err). the chapter on dido in j.d. reed’s virgil’s gaze (which btw i extremely recommend) says many very cool things about vergil’s Constant use of this verb for dido, including:

‘Dido’s welcoming speech ends with an even subtler and more emotional identification. Her last word—errat, “wanders”—naturally adheres to Aeneas; in his own words, for example, at 1.333. But erro is also her word, connected to her by an etymological pun: the third-century Sicilian historian Timaeus had said that the name Dido was applied to her by Libyans because of her wanderings in exile. [...] The last line of her first speech, in view of this wordplay, makes Aeneas a kind of Dido: perhaps, she fears, he wanders a castaway in some wood or city. Her sympathy with the plight of the Trojans can go no further than to cast their leader as an alter ego’. they are doubles to dido at least. 

and then aeneas seems to see them as interchangeable Enough with one another that him helping to build carthage counts as the city he is destined to found! it takes the literal divine intervention of mercury telling aeneas off for placing the High Foundations Of Carthage (which a Reader knows need to instead by the High Walls Of Rome!!! but aeneas doesn’t!!!) to get him to abandon dido/carthage. fun fact until the end of mercury’s speech where he tells aeneas ‘cui regnum Italiae Romanaque tellus / debetur’ ‘[iulus is] owed the rule of italy, and the soil of rome’ (aeneid 4.275-6 trans. bartsch) aeneas has literally never heard of rome.  and it’s mercury’s promise of italy that makes aeneas claim that ‘haec patria est’ (This Is My Land™!!!!!!) (aeneid 4.347) i.e. the verb ‘errare’ / Wandering does Not define aeneas the way it does dido and they have different fates, actually, and maybe even Wandering for Aeneas Who Must Settle In Italy IS To Err and the doubling starts to fall apart! and you’re like. but what exactly Does make aeneas and dido different. is it just fate??? bcs that fate was/is contingent on a historical Future Enmity between their cities (the punic wars) and vergil is using the future that has already occurred to say this imaginary past was inevitable, and then using the assumed inevitability of the past to say that specific historical outcome Was Inevitable Also. and that is a circle :/ and history Could have gone differently. hashtag here’s how hannibal barca can still win. like to me this is vergil implying that ‘fate’ (the fated foundation and Imperium Sine Fine™ of rome) only goes as far as the contingent historical events that you can retroactively use to justify it. and eventually you will run out of that and end up at the end of the parade of heroes in the present. and what do you (augustus) do then. (but maybe i have been reading too much lucan like the pharsalia brainrot is Real)

BUT ALSO that is kind of the point of (my beloved) virgil’s gaze by thee j.d. reed…… like that every Doomed Youth in the aeneid Could Have Been aeneas and every nation/people each doomed youth stands for Could Have Become Rome or an equivalent. do the doubles everywhere suggest that the rise of Rome Specifically is not as Fixed In Fate as it could be. maybe yeah. or that the Fated Rise Of Rome doomed every other almost-aeneas. pessimistic readings of the aeneid i love YOU <3

anyway yeah. every character in the aeneid kind of Is aeneas. if they have a dad they are Pius Aeneas (e.g. lausus and pallas. esp. pallas who aeneas even claims to be embodying when he kills turnus!). if venus is there. that’s aeneas (helen). if their humanity is sacrificed to the future augustan golden age that’s Also aeneas (turnus and also. marcellus in the underworld). if they Do Some Conquering In An Inset Narrative that is also also aeneas (hercules vs cacus, augustus on the shield of aeneas). if they found a city (or try to. or their city is the ghost of troy. but then aren’t all cities that.) then that’s also aeneas. honestly the aeneas-andromache parallels at buthrotum in book 3 make me go nuts because helenus is Right There! but vergil is like no. aeneas WILL be doubled with a doomed trojan princess who hashtag Lived Past The End Of Her Myth. wild. you can probably find aeneas anywhere if you look close enough! also wait i forgot about his GHOST. the imago of aeneas in book 10. aeneas is literally doubled in a ghostly image of himSElf while he is Still Alive. i get that this is a thing which is allowed to happen in epic poetry but also aeneas IS really extremely undead, especially after book 6, so. yeah. you see evert character being Also Aeneas and you’re like well if everyone is aeneas what is aeneas like. where’s that one article by adam parry. ‘Aeneas from the start is absorbed in his own destiny, a destiny which does not ultimately relate to him, but to something later, larger, and less personal: the high walls of Rome, stony and grand, the Augustan Empire.’ ‘Aeneas' failure as a hero goes deeper than the formality of his speech. As he makes his way through the first six books, we see him successively divested of every personal quality which makes a man into a hero.’ ough. at this point what is the difference between aeneas and his ghost!!!!!!

[agirldying]

So like. Uh. My brother was abusive. Our parents got divorced, luckily, (lmao) so we don’t live together anymore, even if I have to see him at family event stuff. But yeah. At least I think he was abusive. But no one else in my family sees it like that. He’s only two years older than me, so I understand. Sometimes I just feel like I’m overreacting or making things up for attention because my memory isn’t that good. He used to yell at me a lot, insult me all the time. Call me unlovable and a freak and a weirdo, tell me everyone hated me and I deserved it, that I was too sensitive and just generally awful. But what if it was just teasing, or normal sibling fights/rivalry, and my family is right and I’m just way too sensitive? He’d get mad at me a lot, sometimes for the littlest things. People talk about not being allowed to breathe as hyperbole, but I remember that he would yell and threaten me if I “breathed too loud”. He’d hit me all the time, whenever he was mad. And when wasn’t he mad? But that’s besides the point. I’m not a huge fan of the word beat, because it makes me feel pathetic, but that’s what he would do. He’d beat and hit me, and choke me. I know looking back he probably wouldn’t have actually killed me, but when you’re like 8 and your older brother who no one will protect you from tells you he’s going to kill you and then ignores you when you try to say you can’t breathe, you’re a bit inclined to believe him. One thing about it was that I say probably, because, well. I wouldn’t be very surprised if he did. If I still lived with him I would definitely fear for my life just as much, if not more. I’ve remained tiny over the years. Malnourished and short and just escaping underweight by a little bit. I’ve always been small for my age, small in general. He’s always been so much taller and stronger and bigger. And he only grows. He only takes more wrestling classes, works out more, grows taller, becomes stronger, while I remain the same or worse. I’m sure I’m stronger than an 8 year old, but the difference between him and me has always been so obvious, to me, at least. Evidently not to the rest of my family. I’d go crying to them all the time when I was little, saying what he’d done that day, how much it hurt. I trusted them to help me. And my sisters laughed in my face, and my dad straight up didn’t care, and my mother would sigh and say she’d talk to him and then never would. Maybe my dad did care. I think that’s why I never told him. I knew that he’d yell and hit my brother just like my brother did to me, and I still wanted to protect him from that. So maybe that’s it. Either way, I thought it was normal. I thought it was all normal. And I’m aware that my dad probably influenced my brother a lot as well. Anyways, I stopped going to my family for help, I stopped going to anyone for help, because I’d been raised to believe that that gets you mocked and belittled, or that at very least it doesn’t do anything. Any vulnerability would, really. My brother would always lie all the time too. I’m always hesitant to call it gaslighting, because how could he have known what he was doing was gaslighting? I came out to him when I was 13 (he would’ve been 15) and he called me slurs and disgusting, then left our house with our mother because he didn’t want to look at me. And then he told me that what he did was fine. That it wasn’t that bad, that he hadn’t called me disgusting, that I was being sensitive again, that he hadn’t actually said that, that he was only joking. Apparently he’s always just fucking joking. And that’s just one example. He’d do that to me a million times over over a million different things. I still don’t know if I can trust my memory, yknow? Cause he says it was different, and my family doesn’t treat it like it was at all as bad as I remember, and again, my memory isn’t the greatest anyway. (Btw sorry this is so long, but yeah, 1/2)

(1/2)

[allthingsfern]

The movies from the “I was tagged” post

I am gonna kinda do what Bud @bwwhitney​ did and share what movie each photo is from. Sorry that I added so much detail, but all y’all know I love this shit.

BTW, I tried to choose films (and/or GIFs/images) that were not my usual I have posted here before. I have many films I watch often. 

1. Mata Hari (That is Garbo in the GIF. One of her best films, though heavily melodramatic. Yet, as with most of her Hollywood films, her presence elevates it to art. And yes, I cry like a baby during the conclusion. However, the film that breaks me down from the moment it starts to the very end is her Camille. Really, I cannot even talk about it much because I start sobbing, even though it is a silly story about a prostitute and her obsessed young lover, but the way the film tells the story takes my breath away. Anyway, I saw this GIF and could not resist it, since it exemplifies Mata Hari’s hyperbolic ridiculousness of trying to make Garbo into a goddess, which she always was. MGM studio heads rarely realized all Garbo really ever had to do was just look at the camera and make millions of us swoon. She was a Goddess because she was so intelligent, so talented, that she knew how to discretely let her beauty reflect and magnify her gifts to us mere mortals.) 

2. Human Capital (I cannot say much about this since I only saw it once, but loved it. Fabrizio Gifuni, who is in this GIF, was also in The Best of Youth, a 6 hour mini-series I have seen 3 times. Great actor in this brutal depiction of how ravaging human greed and ruthless lust for power can be. Heartbreakingly insightful. This one is on my rewatch list.)

3. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (One of the few musicals I deeply love; one of my all time favorite films. That is Jane Russell in the GIF. I thought the guy was and Mariska Hargitay's dad, but no. FYI, in this movie, Jane Russell does a superb, funny impersonation of Monroe. It is a loving tribute to her costar.) 

4. The 10th Victim (From one of my all time favorite films, which I have posted about several times here, this is a rarely seen brunette Ursula Andress. She is only a brunette during the opening credits and then comes the big BANG BANG surprise, which, coincidentally, was spoofed in Austin Powers. BTW, I used this movie in my gender and media class a couple of times and the students loved it. This movie has kinda a cult following among young folks. Who knew?) 

5. Key Largo (Bacall & Edward G. Robinson, from one of the most upsetting scenes, EVER. He is a really nasty gangster in this movie, absolutely putrid. He leans over and whispers something in her ear, while he is holding a gun. Hot stuff for a film from the 40s. The GIF is her reaction.) 

6. Funny Face (Another one of the few musicals I adore and another one fo the movies I have written about here several times. I chose this one GIF because it is a short clip from the opening credits. I believe the woman on the swing may be the 40s/50s supermodel, Dovima, the woman in Avedon’s iconic elephant fashion photo. BTW, Dovima has a small role in the beginning of movie, playing a brainless model.)

7. Casino Royale-1967 (Another one of my all time favorites, it includes a scene with Ursula Andress and a Hasselblad. What more does a movie need to be great, I ask you? Okay, I know this movie has issues, but there is something alluring about it, something elegantly sensuous, beyond sexual about it--especially when Ursula Andress is on the screen--so I am not bothered by its flaws. And then there is “The Look of Love,” one of the most romantic songs, ever. OMG, indeed.) 

8. Bring It On (Another one of the movies I have posted about here a couple of times. One of the best films about class & race in the US, I also used this movie in my gender and media classes a couple of times.) 

And “jazz hands” for fellow Bring It On fan  @amymontico​:

9. McLintock! (One of two early 60s John Wayne films I still love. This one and North to Alaska are two of the films I first saw in Miami’s Tower Theater, which was in our neighborhood. This was during my first year living in Miami, before my parents came to the US. I also recall seeing Blue Hawaii and Midnight Lace there during that time. I AM old... OH! And that is, left to right, Yvonne de Carlo, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara.) 

10. The Great Lie (Not sure why this movie is not better known, because it is a brilliantly passionate melodrama. Bette Davis and Mary Astor share a couple of months and their immense dislike for each other in a lonely cabin in the dessert. The details of why they hate each other and why they are in the dessert are juicy, so I am not going to spoil it.)  

11. What a Way to Go! (Shirley MacLaine gets to wear what seems like 5000 over the top Edith Head mid-60s costume designs. This is a solid romantic comedy, not great, but very good. Visually rich, sometimes ridiculously so, but that is the point of the film. Also, it has several stories and each one is done in a different cinematic style. Love this movie. Like Casino Royale, 1967, I understand this film is flawed, but I love rewatching it. The film also stars Dick Van Dyke, Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Robert Cummings, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, and an older Margaret Dumont, who was the society matron in several classic Marx Brothers movies.)