Ares & Aphrodite & Other Latro Stuff

Chris · 27 May 2003, 17:42 · from urth-v0305.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Chris" <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Ares & Aphrodite & Other Latro Stuff
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 17:42:03 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0305-3433 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0305/3433.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Greetings,

>3.  Why does Latro have blood on his fingers after seeing the armor of King
>Leonidas (ch. 36, pp. 290, 291)?

It's implied (I think) that Latro slew Leonidas at Thermopylae. The blood i=
s=20
Leonidas', and if I recall correctly Latro feels guilt, and tries to hide=20
the blood (which no one else would probably be able to see anyway); also, h=
e=20
tries to rationalize just how he knows so much about the way Leonidas died.=20
He gives a fairly rational explanation, but it's clear that this is not the=20
real reason he knew what happened.

>4.  Perhaps my biggest question: What exactly happens at the end of the
>manumission ceremony (ch.37)?

This was extremely confusing to me as well. This is a historical event,=20
though I have not actually seen where it's recorded originally - I know=20
Thucydides talks about it, though. The ceremony is one in which a large=20
number of Spartan slaves are being freed, for serving in the war. However,=20
the Spartans had something up their sleeve. After the ceremony, the Spartan=
s=20
slaughtered the now-free slaves, on the pretext that slaves are prohibited=20
by law from bearing arms (which they of course were forced to do during the=20
war). If I had to guess, the purpose of the whole scheme was to get them al=
l=20
in the same place and unawares, and also to make an example to the other=20
slaves.

Latro isn't very clear in his account of what goes on, but the reason he wa=
s=20
in danger was that he was freed during this same ceremony. His=20
sponsor/bodyguard tears the crown off his head because this crown identifie=
s=20
him as someone who took part in the ceremony, and thus a target to be kille=
d=20
(and Pausanius apparently did *not* want Latro killed along with the rest).

Hope that helps,
Chris

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* =20
http://join.msn.com/?page=3Dfeatures/junkmail

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net