The Prophet

[tectak]

Hi Mark,

Herakles is the Greek spelling (no "c" in Greek), and I'd always use Hera -- if I'd Romanised it I'd have Hercules and Juno, and that just sucks. Romans pinch everything. Bloody Romans, what have they ever done for us? Neither Hera nor Herakles are prophets though, just players. Heroic, once. We seem to have rather diminished the use of the word "hero". Hera, the rather long-suffering sister-wife of Zeus the mad shagger, always turns up as a bit of a shrew keen on vengeance toward her husband's sperm receptacles. The two stars are the Dioskouri, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux to the bloody Romans), more by-blows of Zeus who was big on bastardising all of mythological Greece for a while there... later the twin thing showed up with a lot of similarities in the Romulus and Remus story, which in turn shares a lot of interesting ideas with the birth of Jesus. But I digress, sort of, or maybe not. Then we wander off to Carthage, where Dido's puzzle (what's the shape with the largest area that can be covered by strips of skin from an ox hide) originated and baffled maths boffins for centuries after. Still, a smart woman has no place in history -- so Carthage is better known for that silly bugger Hannibal marching elephants through the snow and eventually irritating Rome so much that they sewed the land with salt, thus rendering the isoperimetric problem to a vague curiosity rather than the pride of a living city. Some civilisations, it seems, just can't deal with rivals. Of course, that sort of thing would never happen these days...

When once we masked with myth the suffering inflicted by man on his fellows, today we hide it behind the trivialities of reality TV and what colour a dress is on Facebook. So I don't know, maybe this will never be clear and is too esoteric but I felt I owed you an explanation because you have actually given me quite a lot to think about for future edits. I greatly appreciate it, thank you.

My point exaktly,
tektak.
( aka Popeye the Sailor Man)