Divorce in the 8th Century

From the Law of the Couple (Cáin Lánamna), an Irish compilation that dates to around AD 800, comes this list of the reasons for which a wife can divorce her husband:

• Sterility
• Impotence
• Entrance into Holy Orders
• Entrance into the Church
• Loss of property/Inability to provide
• Obesity
• Revealing secrets of the bedroom
• Spreading slander or lies about her
• Spreading mocking songs or poems about her
• Unjust chastisement that leaves a mark
• Abandonment for another woman
• Homosexuality
• Admitting to use of magic or other means to steal her affections
• Inability to provide for her daily needs

Ice Age Fossils

The bones of a young Columbian Mammoth, part of a "remarkable" deposit of Pleistocene fossils found near Snowmass, Colorado. Other finds include mastodons and giant ground sloth.

Celts to Vikings 6b: What the Druids Said

Irish poetry is full of passages like this:

I am the wind that blows over the sea,
I am the wave of the sea,
I am the roaring of the sea,
I am the bull of the seven battles,
I am the god who gives fire to the head. . .

and

I have been a narrow, gilded spear,
I believe in what is clear,
I have been a raindrop in the air,
I have been the furthest star,
I have been word among letters,
I have been book in the beginning
I have been light of the lamp. . . .
I have been path, I have been eagle,
I have been fisherman's boat on the sea,
I have been shield in the battle,
I have been string of a harp,
in this way for nine years.
In the water, in the foam,
I have been sponge in the fire,
I have been tree in the uncharted wood.

The last time I taught about the ancient Celts I passed along the interpretation of the poems that I learned from the textbooks: that these are poetic expression of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Lately, though, I have reading some half mad scholars with a spiritual bent (notably Jean Markale) and they have convinced me that the very rational Julius Caesar did not understand the teachings of the druids. I now think that the doctrine behind these poems is much broader than just human souls moving from body to body. I think these poems express a vision of the universe as a process of transformation, in which everything is always being changed into something else. In this view a human soul may just be one way of seeing a single spark of the cosmic fire as it flashes past, before it is reabsorbed into the conflagration.

Doagh Holed Stone, Ireland

Closing in on Zero Energy Use

Engineers are getting better and better at reducing the energy use in structures of all kinds, approaching the goal of buildings that need no outside power. This office building in Golden, Colorado may actually achieve that goal by the time it is completed, and at a reasonable cost. With commercial buildings accounting for 18 percent of US energy use, this is a far from trivial achievement. No radical new technologies are needed, just a small array of solar panels and the rigorous application of every energy saving trick in the book.

Of course, Golden, Colorado is the sort of place where everybody drives everywhere, so I am not sure that the overall impact will be less than a conventional building in Manhattan. Still, every bit of savings helps.

America is Safer but Worries More

First, the facts:

Between 1990 and 2009, the national violent-crime rate was halved, while property crime dropped to 60 percent of its previous rate.

Then, the perception:

almost every year since 1989, most Americans have told pollsters they believe crime is getting worse.

This need to fear is one of the most annoying things about my fellow Americans. The fear of dangerous dark-skinned thugs who roost in scary neighborhoods as become a major part of the suburban identity. We get off on seeing ourselves under siege by faceless enemies -- criminals, terrorists -- and we see every reported crime and every attempt to blow up a plane as proof that things are constantly getting worse. The reality that we are the safest people who ever lived somehow offends us.

The Department of Just Desserts

Unsufferable windbag Zahi Hawass, long the czar of archaeology in Egypt, was lately promoted to Minister of Antiquities by the dying Mubarak government, perhaps in the hope that his television charisma would help the fading dictator's cause. Ever the ladder-climber, Hawass leaped at the chance, putting this notice on his web site:

Many people make the mistake of thinking that dreams cannot come true, but they can. You have to believe, and know that they are more than just imagination.

Typical of Hawass that his dreams consist of promotions rather than, say, actual archaeological discoveries. But then this is the man who regularly tells interviewers things like:

I'm damn good. . . . I am already famous and powerful. [What] I do I do for Egypt. It is the first time that Egypt has been correctly explained to the public.

Yes, it's true, everything you have ever read or heard about Egypt before is wrong!

Alas, Hawass probably did not dream that his ascendancy would be greeted by a demonstration organized by young archaeologists:

"Get out," a crowd of 150 archaeology graduates chanted outside the office of Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass, who threw in his lot with the old order when he accepted a Cabinet post in the last weeks of Hosni Mubarak's rule.

Whether Hawass, entrusted with preserving Egypt's museums and monuments, will go the way of Mubarak and resign is uncertain. . . .

The archaeologists' protest was also deeply personal, with protesters saying Hawass was a "showman" and publicity hound with little regard for thousands of archaeology students who have been unable to find work in their field.

"He doesn't care about us," said 22-year-old Gamal el-Hanafy, who graduated from Cairo University in 2009 and carried his school certificates in a folder. "He just cares about propaganda."

In response,

Hawass has maintained that his first love is Egypt's heritage, not himself, and that courting publicity raises the national profile.

Because, you know, the archaeological treasures of Egypt are so obscure that they need a self-serving ass like Hawass to promote them. And no, I've never seen his show, because the brief appearances I have seen are so appalling I can't imagine 30 minutes of the man.

Cerbalus aravensis

A new species of giant spider recently discovered in the Israeli desert, with a leg span of 14 centimeters, or 5.5 inches.

In Iran

Protesters marching today chanted

Mubarak ... Ben Ali ... Now it’s your turn, Seid Ali

Seid Ali meaning the Ayatollah Khamenei.

The Facebook Revolution

Andrew Sullivan is blogging today about the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions (also here and here). Despite the doubts of Malcolm Gladwell and a bunch of curmudgeons, it seems that the young organizers of these protest movements relied very heavily on Facebook to get things started, and that in the days leading up to the protests Facebook use soared in both countries. At a deeper level, we are hearing now that young Arabs interested in freedom and democracy have been contacting each other via Facebook for years, developing international links and spreading ideas. To take just one example, there were major protests in Tunisia two years ago, triggered by Facebook calls from Egyptian activists for expressions of outrage against the murder of two young Egyptians.

Yes, Social Security is a Government Program

According to this study, 44 percent of people on Social Security tell pollsters "No, I have not used a government social program," along with 40 percent of people on Medicare even 25 percent of people on Food Stamps. The need to deny dependence on the government runs very deep in America.

The Faces of Lena Hara

Several years ago some paleontologists were exploring Lena Hara Cave in East Timor (in the Indonesian archipelago), looking for the bones of extinct giant rats. Instead they found a group of stylized faces carved into the rock. The cave had already been explored by archaeologists interested in its numerous rock paintings, but these carvings had not been noted. One carving was recently dated using a uranium isotope method, which yielded an estimated age of 10,000 to 12,000 years.

198 Methods of Nonviolent Action

A list put together by American activist Gene Sharp, whose Albert Einstein Institute is said to have influenced some of the older Egyptian activists behind the recent revolt. Sharp has long emphasized that nonviolence is essential for protesters in the sort of police state that would use any violence as an excuse to crack down.

From the list of Frequently Asked Questions at the AEI website:

Q. How does nonviolent action work?

A. Nonviolent action works by getting a population to withdraw its support and obedience from the opponents. By getting key groups to withdraw their consent, nonviolent action is able to remove the sources of power for a regime or opponent group.

These sources of power are:

1. Authority—the belief among the people that the regime or opponent is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
2. Human resources—the number and importance of the persons and groups that are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the regime or opponent;
3. Skills and knowledge—needed by the regime or opponent to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
4. Intangible factors—psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the regime or opponent;
5. Material resources—the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
6. Sanctions—punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and noncooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime or opponent to exist and carry out its policies.

All of these sources of power, however, depend on acceptance of the regime or opponent, on the submission and obedience of the population, and on the cooperation of innumerable people and the many institutions of society. When this obedience, acceptance, and support are withdrawn, the regime or opponent can be severely weakened or toppled.

I like this analysis. It is certainly true that all governments depend on consent to function; no dictatorship can coerce all of the people all of the time. How many regime supporters are needed is an interesting question, and it strikes me that a small band of fanatics willing to kill and die for their cause could rule many states. I think the Green Movement failed to topple the Iranian theocracy because the mullahs have strong support from a large segment of the people, as well as the prestige that their religious status gives them in a Shi'ite polity. What the majority wants is irrelevant if the government has a big enough minority willing to use violence in its defense.

Celts to Vikings 6a: the Gundestrup Cauldron

The Gundestrup Cauldron is a silver bowl measuring 69 centimeters across, or about 28 inches. It was found disassembled in a Danish peat bog in 1891. It dates to the first century BC, and it is covered with striking images of Celtic gods and heroes.

This is probably the most famous image, thought by most to represent Cernunnos, the Horned One, a Celtic deity attested in many inscriptions from France and Austria. (But not in Britain, and not mentioned in the Irish or Welsh legends.)

This fellow is often said to be dunking people into a cauldron, possibly corpses to be revivified as in the Welsh legends, or possibly sacrificial victims. But that might not be a cauldron at all; other suggestions include the mouth of a sacred shaft (the Celts threw some victims of human sacrifice down deep shafts or wells) and a stone on which victims were slaughtered.

The wheel appears in many pieces of Celtic religious art, possibly representing the sun, or thunder, or something else altogether. This being, whoever he is, comes with a fascinating menagerie of griffins, snakes, and what look like hyenas.

The outside plates all represent the faces of figures that most people take to be deities. This appears to be a goddess, and the scenes of her fighting a bull and dancing with the plants may be aspects of her myth. The captions of these plates in books and online often identify the faces as gods known from Gaulish inscriptions or Irish stories, but except for Cernunnos I put no faith in these attributions. Based on its style, the cauldron was probably made in southeastern Europe. We know next to nothing about the Celts who moved southeast from their Swiss heartland, except that some of them attacked Delphi in Greece and ended up in the part of Turkey that came to be called Galatia. Since the names of the Irish gods seem to have been very different from the names of the gods in Gaul, why would the names of the gods of Celts in Romania be the same as either? I think the phantasmagoric quality of the images is more important than any attempt to name and systematize them. Like the crazy imagery of the Irish stories, these pictures seem to emphasize how wild the world of the gods is, how unpredictable, how hard for us to understand or describe.

Still Unemployed in Tunisia

Thomas Fuller has a nice article in the Times reviewing the situation in Tunisia a month after their dictator fled into exile:

In cafes and on street corners, Tunisians say they are proud that their uprising against decades of authoritarian rule inspired protests in Egypt and elsewhere across the Arab world. But many also say they are realizing that bringing down the dictator may have been the easy part.

With restrictions on the media lifted and freedom of speech flourishing, years of bottled-up demands over salaries, working conditions and other rights have erupted. . . .

“The unemployed gained nothing from the revolution,” said Hamdi Tarek, a 29-year-old from Tunis who works odd jobs hawking vegetables and clothing on the street. “We’re still waiting. We are waiting for work.”

Finding the Wind

This conceptual design for a new bridge in Italy takes advantage of the winds that blow through many canyons. Might not be such a good thing for birds that try to nest on the bridge, though.

Celts to Vikings 5: the Celts

On Wednesday we started our two-week unit on the ancient Celts. We began with some of the Roman sources, especially Julius Caesar's little ethnography of the Gauls and Tacitus' account of the revolt of Queen Boudicca in Britain. Caesar tells us that the Gauls -- the Celts of modern France -- were a strongly class-bound society: "The ordinary people are considered almost as slaves: they dare do nothing on their own account and are not called to counsels." The aristocratic men were of two kinds, the warriors and the druids. The druids, he says,

are involved in matters of religion. They manage public and private sacrifices and interpret religious customs and ceremonies. Young men flock to them in large numbers to gain instruction, and they hold the druids in great esteem. For they decide almost all disputes, both public and private.

The druids enforce their edicts through their power to ban people from sacrifices, which would damage the standing of the victim both with the gods and in the community.

Druids do not fight, nor do they pay taxes . . . they are exempt from military service and from all obligations. Such great rewards encourage many to begin training, either of their own accord or sent by parents and relatives. There they are told to memorize a large number of lines of poetry, and some spend twenty years in training. Nor do they think it proper to commit this teaching to writing. . . The principal doctrine they attempt to impart is that souls do not die but after death cross from one person to another.

Caesar devotes two paragraphs to Gaulish religion, especially their habit of human sacrifice. In general he emphasizes the otherness of the Gauls, the things about them that were most different from Rome. I think, though, that the story of Caesar's conquest of the Gauls tells us something else about them. Caesar was a competent military commander but hardly a brilliant one. His real genius lay in politics, and he was able to conquer the Gauls because his political maneuvering kept them from ever uniting against him. It seems to me that if the political skills Caesar developed in Italy worked so well among the Gauls, the Gauls cannot have been that different from the Romans. And indeed we see from archaeology that the Gauls who lived closest to Rome had adopted much of Mediterranean civilization, especially the habit of living in towns.

However much the more civilized Gauls had become like the Romans, they still retained the Celtic style. Even in one class it is possible to get across how different that style was from the habits of the Romans. Among the Celts there was little reverence for order or moderation, and much more for the bold gesture and the flamboyant act. They had a habit of fighting naked, for example, preferring to show off their courage rather than protect themselves with armor. They loved gaudy jewelry, spectacular ceremonies, grand boasting, outrageous tall tales, and acts of doomed courage. The liked stories about lovers who defied the world and died for it, about heroes who fought alone against armies, about men who kept their oaths even though it meant certain destruction. There is an impractical air about much of what they did, as if, for them, the style with which one fought counted for more than victory.

Celebration

Will Wilkinson:

Jubilation is catching. It is impossible, for me at least, to watch the crowds in Egypt, overjoyed at Hosni Mubarak's hotly-desired resignation, with dry eyes and an unclenched throat. . . .

I admit that I am more than a little tempted to rain on the parade and note that Mr Mubarak's departure guarantees nothing and that it is not unreasonable to fear a turn for the worse. There's a tiny, stability-loving Burke on my shoulder, and I'm afraid he's no devil. All the same, for now I'm not listening. Well, I did listen a little, but I've heard enough. It is partly due to my Burkean worries that I feel the pessimist in me should just stuff it for now. Whether or not Egypt flowers into a model democracy, whether or not Egyptians tomorrow live more freely than Egyptians today, today they threw off a tyrant. The surge of overwhelming bliss that has overtaken Egyptians is the rare beautitude of democratic will. The hot blush of liberation, a dazzled sense of infinite possibility swelling millions of happy breasts is a precious thing of terrible, unfathomable beauty, and it won't come to these people again. Whatever the future may hold, this is the happiest many people will ever feel. This is the best day of some peoples' lives. The tiny Dionysian anarchist on my other shoulder is no angel, but I cannot deny that there is something holy in this feeling, that it is one of few human experiences that justifies life—that satisfies, however briefly, our desperate craving for more intensity, for more meaning, for more life from life. Whatever the future holds, there will be disappointment, at best. But there is always disappointment. Today, there is joy.

Mubarak's Fall

The departure of the dictator may not end up changing anything in Egypt, but I think it is great that the protesters have achieved something. I was beginning to worry that the whole rebellion would peter out into disillusionment and stagnation. Now the protesters and their allies have at least rid Egypt of their number one enemy, and that accomplishment may cement the psychological gains of the rebellion even if real democracy is still a long time coming.

The Threefold Death of the Hermaphrodite

This is Lindow Man, a body of the first century AD found in a peat bog in England. Lindow Man is probably the most famous of all the bog bodies because of how he died: hit on the head with an ax, garroted, and stabbed in the neck in rapid succession. The "threefold death" has a long literary pedigree in the Celtic lands, and a whole list of Celtic heroes and villains managed to die in three ways at once. The general view is that Lindow Man must have been sacrificed to the gods, and that the literary trope of the threefold death is some kind of memory or echo of ancient sacrificial practice.

I am planning to mention Lindow Man in class on Monday, so this afternoon I was looking for pictures to use in my slide show. One of the pages Google took me to had this title:

The Body from the Bog Comes Out
2,000 year old bog mummy in England was a homosexual Druid who most likely offered himself as a human sacrifice against invading Romans to keep them (successfully) out of Ireland

Ok, I thought, you've got my attention. Reading on I discovered that the creator of this page, a certain Connell O'Donovan who seems to be an expert on gay Mormons, gives a lot of the usual speculations about Lindow man: an unjustified leap from the radiocarbon dating of the body to an exact calendar date of AD 60, a questionable assertion that the threefold death thing is an Irish tradition (it is also attested in Welsh documents, including the legends about Merlin), plausible but far from certain speculations that make Lindow Man a druid, Roman accusations about rampant homosexuality among the Celts, and so on. In short, an interesting page but nothing remarkable. Then, this:

In a very curious and obscure Latin text from the early 1100s, Christo-pagan scholar Hildebert of Lavardin (France) wrote a "song" called De Hermaphrodito (or De ermafrodito, On the Hermaphrodite), which details the prophetic, tripartite death of an arms-bearing hermaphrodite.

Well, I thought, that would certainly be worth reading. Scrolling down, I found that our author gives the whole poem, in both Latin and English:

Now as my pregnant mother carried me in the belly
She is held to have consulted the gods on how I would appear.
Phoebus affirmed: it is a boy; Mars, it is a woman, and Juno, it is neither;
When I was born, I was a hermaphrodite.
When she [my mother] sought my death, the goddess affirmed: He will fall upon arms;
Mars: He will fall from a gallows-tree; Phoebus: He will fall in water. With the casting of a lot, each one came to be.
A tree over-shadows waters, I climb up, sword slips,
Falling upon that which I took up, and I myself begin to sink upon it.
Foot caught by branches, head falls in a river; and behold:
Man, woman, neither; floods, spears, a gallows-tree.

And with that I thought, Mr. O'Donovan, you've made my day.

Quick, Hide the Statues

Italian Archaeologists have uncovered a trove of statues that were deliberately buried in a basin near a villa on the Via Anagnina. The statues seem to represent members of the Severan Dynasty, which ruled Rome from AD 193 to 235. After Alexander Severus was assassinated by his own troops, the owners of this villa must have decided that they no longer wanted statues of the former dynasty prominently displayed on their property.

At the Quarry

Wednesday I made an an inspection of a prehistoric quarry site here in Washington, a site that has long been known to archaeologists. There are several of these quarries, and all of them are just ravines where the thick layer of glacial cobbles that underlies much of the city is exposed on the surface. Where there was so much stone, people were not inspired to be very careful with the resource, so the process was very messy. They started by picking up cobbles, or digging them out of the slope, and then knocking off a few pieces to see what was inside. Many were rejected at that stage, like the ones shown above. Others were worked down into rough bifaces we call turtlebacks. Most of those turtlebacks were transported elsewhere to be made into tools, but many were unsatisfactory for some reason and those were left at the quarry. In making them these ancient Indians were, again, not very careful, so the process had a particularly high ration of waste flakes to finished project, leaving the whole area buried in broken pieces of stone like the ones below.

Pride

Tom Friedman, still in Cairo, reports on a new sense of pride in the Egyptians he meets. Asked why he was volunteering to pick up trash around the square, one young man answered,

This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.

Another man, an educated businessman who works in Saudi Arabia, brought his children to Tahrir Square to experience what was happening there. Before the uprising, he said,

I was not proud to tell people I was an Egyptian. Today, with what’s been done here, I can proudly say again I am an Egyptian.

In the Attic

The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius

John William Waterhouse, 1883

8 Spruce Street

New York's newest skyscraper is also Frank Gehry's first. Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff likes it, calling it "the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen's CBS building went up 46 years ago." Slide show here.

I have no particular feelings; I like this ruffled surface better than the plain lines of international modernism, but I don't see anything about this building to love. In the category of weird things said by art critics, Ouroussoff writes that for him this building "seems to crystallize a particular moment in cultural history, in this case the turning point from the modern to the digital age."

What on earth does that mean? In what way does this building represent, symbolize, encode, inscribe, or whatever verb you prefer anything about the digital age, the internet, the decline of industry, or anything else other than Frank Gehry's particular style? I can only guess that for Ouroussoff, the international style somehow symbolized the modern era, and Gehry's attempts to break out of the box represent whatever one wishes to call the times we live in now. But, really.

Lysistrata in Brussels

Belgium, on the verge of falling apart into separate ethnic enclaves, has been 241 days without a government. Now the BBC reports that Belgian senator Marleen Temmerman has a solution:

"I call on the spouses of all negotiators to withold sex until a deal is reached," said Ms Temmerman in an article for a Belgian newspaper. "Have no more sex until the new administration is posing on the steps of the Palace." . . . She said if politicians' partners followed her suggestion, the "palaver" of coalition-forming would be resolved quite quickly.

It would probably work better than another suggestion, the "grow a beard" campaign, which suggested that all Belgian men go without shaving until a government is formed.

Celts to Vikings 4: Rome Falls

Rome left many legacies to the western world: the Latin language, the great code of law, the constitution of the Republic that had so much influence on the makers of the United States . In my class on Monday I focused on two of those legacies. First, the vision of power, of a vast and orderly state with enormous wealth and armed might, where the laws were followed and the emperor’s edicts were obeyed without question. This vision was kept fresh in the minds of medieval Europeans by the enormous physical legacy of Rome: roads, bridges, canals, forts, walls, cities, monuments, and more. When you find yourself wondering about the exaggerated awe some Medieval and Renaissance thinkers had for the classical past, you have to remember that they lived intimately with the surviving remnants of Roman genius: they traveled on Roman roads, depended on Roman bridges, saw around them the ruins of Roman water systems better engineered than anything that could be built in their own day. Contemplating the pathetic inability of their own governments to get anything done, they remembered the days of the Caesars, at whose command kingdoms disappeared, cities rose from nothing, and the world was covered with roads.

The Empire left another legacy, though, like a gray stain marring those monuments of gleaming marble: a legacy of corruption, assassination, civil war, conspiracy, treason trials, torture, and black magic. I had my students read fifty pages of Ammianus Marcelinus, who died around AD 400, the last of the many great pagan historians of the ancient world. Ammianus was a senior officer in the Roman army who knew many emperors and other leading figures, and he participated in some of the events he described. He was also a fine writer, and I enjoy his book. One of the things he wrote about was the awful treason trials that sprang up again and again across the troubled late imperial world. Conspiracies were unmasked at regular intervals and the conspirators executed in whatever ways the cruelty of the times could devise: torn to pieces, nailed to crosses, burned alive. It is impossible for us to know which of these conspiracies were real and which had been devised by sinister operators like Paul the Chain, so called because he could fabricate a chain of evidence linking any person, no matter how blameless, to any crime. We cannot sort out what to believe because the accused were usually tortured until they confessed. Reading these stories one is reminded again of what an awful evil torture is. Tortured enough – and some of these emperors and their agents accepted no limits on their power to inflict pain – men will confess to anything. Many of the accused conspirators, Ammianus tells us, confessed to attempting to kill the emperor with black magic. Thus the catalog of evils is completed, and to the all-too-real horrors of the poisoned dagger and the rack were added the imaginary evils of demonolatry, maleficia, and ruinous spells. As Ammianus warns us, in such a world truth is the first casualty. When men confess to the impossible in order to end the pain, and this is recorded as the verdict of justice, something truly terrible has happened, not just to them but to a whole civilization.

The sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 was an awful shock to the Mediterranean world. "When Rome fell," wrote St. Jerome, "the whole world perished in one city." Many people had thought Rome would stand undefeated until the end of time, when the trumpets of the final judgment would finally breach its walls. Instead it fell to a motley army of barbarians and Roman deserters that would have been brushed aside by any of Rome's great commanders. The immediate cause was not a military defeat, but another dismal round of fatal intrigue. Advisers of the Emperor Honorious convinced him that the general responsible for defending Rome, Stilicho, was betraying him, so Honorious summoned Stilicho to his court and had him assassinated. Many of Stilicho’s men promptly switched sides, preferring to serve under a barbarian king rather than the emperor who had killed their leader. Rome was left undefended, and the barbarians walked in.

Long before the barbarians conquered it, Rome had been fatally weakened by mistrust. That mistrust was fed by centuries of conspiracy, treason, slander, betrayal, and especially by the bloody tools of the torturer. A land where torture rules is a hall of mirrors where the truth can never be known and no one can be trusted, where the cries of anguished prisoners substitute for the discoveries of investigation and the arguments of reason. The Eternal City fell, not to barbarian armies, but to the rack, whispered rumor, and the knife in the dark.

Boy and Nest

Ben with a nest he found in the woods; this picture is a few weeks old, but I just found it on my camera.

Celtic Art 2

Gold torcs from Vix, France (above) and Snettisham, England (below).