Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
"Apollonius Rhodius, as I read one evening in the Philadelphia Library, speaks of the Arcadians of Greece having a tradition that their ancestors were so ancient that they inhabited the Earth long before the Moon had ever become our satellite.
It is said these holy persons were in some places so venerated that people came on their knees, and bowing below the ring, asked forgiveness possibly for sexual excesses. Rhodius mentions the usage of infibulation in antiquity, and Fabricius d'Aquapendente remarks that infibulation was usually practiced in females for the preservation of chastity.
Rhodius speaks of the sweat being sweet after eating honey; the Ephemerides and Paullini also mention it. Chromidrosis, or colored sweat, is an interesting anomaly exemplified in numerous reports. Black sweat has been mentioned by Bartholinus, who remarked that the secretion resembled ink; in other cases Galeazzi and Zacutus Lusitanus said the perspiration resembled sooty water.
Then there is a translation into blank verse of the third book of the Argonauticon of Apollonius Rhodius. The other books are lost, but he translated the whole poem, extending to about 6000 lines.... And I may mention here, though it happens to be in prose, that of two plays, one, a tragedy, survives.
At the period of spawning, a male chooses a female companion and with great vigilance keeps off all those who wish to approach her. When the laying becomes imminent, the Rhodius, swimming up and down at the bottom of the stream, at length discovers a Unio. The bivalve is asleep with his shell ajar, not suspecting the plot which is being formed against him.
Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary writer of epic, in an age of Criticism. He dealt with the tale of "Jason," and conceivably he may have borrowed from older minstrels.
At the age of fourteen her appetite became normal. In the older writings many curious instances of abnormal appetite are seen. Borellus speaks of individuals swallowing stones, horns, serpents, and toads. Plater mentions snail-eating and eel-eating, two customs still extant. Rhodius is accredited with seeing persons who swallowed spiders and scorpions.
The court of that sovereign was, moreover, adorned by a constellation of seven poets, to which the gay Alexandrians gave the nickname of the Pleiades. They are said to have been Lycophron, Theocritus, Callimachus, Aratus, Apollonius Rhodius, Nicander, and Homer the son of Macro.
The poems of Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Lucan, Camoens, Tasso and Milton are "literary" epics. But such poetry as the Odyssey, the Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied, poetry which seems an immediate response to some general and instant need in its surrounding community such poetry is "authentic" epic.
The poetical reader would have been better pleased if he had fulfilled an intention he had of translating the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius. Though it was not the lot of Warton to attain distinction in his clerical profession, yet literary honours, more congenial to his taste and habits, awaited him.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking