6 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. https://tllpod.podbean.com/e/oscvlvm-panciera/

      There were three types of named kisses in Roman culture generally: one for family, one for wives, and one for mistresses. (see basium, savium)

      One Emperor outlawed daily kissing (greetings) likely because of a facial disease for which kissing would have increased the spread.

      -culum is a Latin diminutive ending, thus os (mouth) + culum (little) = small mouth or kiss

      see also: //publikationen.badw.de/de/thesaurus/lemmata#63769

  2. Nov 2021
    1. from the river and lay down again in the rushes and kissed the grain-givingsoil.

      Odysseus staggered from the river and lay down again in the rushes and kissed the grain-giving soil.

      This reference to "grain-giving soil" reminds me of this quote:

      History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.<br/>—Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by Jean-Henri FabreJean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)

      ref: quote

      Culturally we often see people kneeling down and kissing the ground after long travels, but we miss the prior references and images and the underlying gratitude for why these things have become commonplace.

      "Grain-giving" = "life giving" here specifically. Compare this to modern audiences see the kissing of the ground more as a psychological "homecoming" action and the link to the grain is missing.

      It's possible that the phrase grain-giving was included for orality's sake to make the meter, but I would suggest that given the value of grain within the culture the poet would have figured out how to include this in any case.

      By my count "grain-giving" as a modifier variously to farmland, soil, earth, land, ground, and corn land appears eight times in the text. All these final words have similar meanings. I wonder if Lattimore used poetic license to change the translation of these final words or if they were all slightly different in the Greek, but kept the meter?

      This is an example of a phrase which may have been given an underlying common phrasing in daily life to highlight gratitude for the life giving qualities, but also served the bard's needs for maintaining meter. Perhaps comparing with other contemporaneous texts for this will reveal an answer?

  3. Oct 2021
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjZAdPX6ek0

      Osculatory targets or plaques were created on pages to give priests

      Most modern people don't touch or kiss their books this way and we're often taught not to touch or write in our texts. Digital screen culture is giving us a new tactile touching with our digital texts that we haven't had since the time of the manuscript.

  4. Sep 2020
  5. Jul 2017
    1. smooching on the first date could be improving the mental health of Aussie singles

      kissing improving mental health or simply producing more serotonin and oxytocin, both which have been linked to feelings of euphoria

  6. Apr 2017