(Head of Aphrodite with cross carved in it; 1st century, Parian marble, found near the Tower of the Winds, in the Roman Agora in Athens. Usually in the National Archeological Museum in Athens; currently at the Onassis Cultural Center as part of “Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd–7th Century A.D.”.)
“Note: We are expressly told in Exodus 2:21 that Moses was given for his wife, Zipporah, the daughter of Reuel (aka. Jethro) the Midianite, the priest of Midian. We are not expressly told that he married anyone else. It is possible for Zipporah to be of Cushite/Ethiopian ancestry if Reuel’s wife was an Ethiopian, or even the mind-staggering possibility that Abraham’s 3rd wife Keturah was an Ethiopian. (His 2nd wife Hagar was an Egyptian.)”
(from “The Cushitic wife of Moses” in Wikipedia’s List of names for the biblical nameless.)
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“‘O Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘You do not yield your secrets to fools. Experts come from Buenos Aires, from North America even. What do they know? One can but marvel at their incompetence. Not one paleontologist has yet unearthed the bones of the unicorn.’
‘The unicorn?’
‘Precisely, the unicorn. The Patagonian unicorn was contemporary with the extinct megafauna of the Late Pleistocene. The last unicorns were hunted to extinction by man in the fifth or sixth millennium B.C. At Lago Posadas you will find two paintings of unicorns. One holds its horn erect as in Psalm 29: “My horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn”. The other is about to impale a hunter and stamps the pampas, as described in the Book of Job.’ (In Job 38:21 it is the horse that ‘paweth the valley’, while in verses 9–10 the unicorn is found unfit to haul a plough.)”
(Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, p. 73.)
“Jovinus, who had viewed the ground with the eye of a general, made his silent approach through a deep and woody vale, till he could distinctly perceive the indolent security of the Germans. Some were bathing their huge limbs in the river; others were combing their long and flaxen hair; others again were swallowing large draughts of rich and delicious wine.”
(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. II, chapter XXV; p. 990 in volume 1 of the Penguin edition.)
“101. At first Constantine threatened in speaking, but requested in writing, και αγραφως μεν ηπειλει δε, ηξιον. His letters gradually assumed a menacing tone; but while he required that the entrance of the church should be open to all, he avoided the odious name of Arius. Athanasius, like a skilful politician, has accurately marked this distinctions (tom. i. p. 788), which allowed him some scope for excuse and delay.”
(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. II, chapter XXI; p. 798 in volume 1 of the Penguin edition.)
“Within these limits the almost invisible and tremulous ball of orthodoxy was allowed securely to vibrate. On either side, beyond this consecrated ground, the heretics and dæmons lurked in ambush to surprise and devour the unhappy wanderer. But as the degrees of theological hatred depend on the spirit of war, rather than on the importance of the controversy, the heretics who degraded, were treated with more severity than those who annihilated, the person of the Son. The life of Athanasius was consumed in irreconcileable opposition to the impious madness of the Arians; but he defended above twenty years the Sabellianism of Marcellus of Ancyra; and when at last he was compelled to withdraw himself from his communion, he continued to mention, with an ambiguous smile, the venal errors of his respectable friend.”
(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. II, chapter XXI; p. 783 in volume 1 of the Penguin edition.)
“I let it be known to my friends, and even strangers as I was wandering around the country that what was interesting me was making English less understandable. Because when it’s understandable, well, people control one another, and poetry disappears – and as I was talking with my friend Norman O. Brown, and he said, ‘Syntax,’ which is what makes things understandable, ‘is the army, is the arrangement of the army.’ So what we’re doing when we make language un-understandable is we’re demilitarizing it, so that we can do our living.”
(John Cage, interviewed about Empty Words, 8 August 1974.)
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