adrasta

Olivia Cooke as Queen Alicent Hightower

Today is Eid Al-Adha, and the children in Gaza are still starving in tents and ruined homes. On a holiday like today, families and friends should be gathering, praying, giving to others, and dining together. However, in Gaza bombs still fall despite the ceasefire, and food is too expensive to buy.

Hamza’s family is suffering from the effects of malnutrition. His family includes him, his siblings, his parents, and several young nieces and nephews. Please consider donating something to him and his family, or boosting their fundraiser. Everything counts!

FUNDRAISER.

lucan's pharsalia, trans. jane wilson joyce &

appian civil wars 1.120, trans john carter

a million (several) years ago I said that in my ideal world, spartacus would have gotten the chance to gut crassus like a fish and read the fate of rome in his entrails. I also said something about spartacus' sacrifice at crixus' funeral games is like a foundational sacrifice/curse on rome. continuing that thought, there's something about how there's a narrative echo of crassus' fate in the fate that falls on spartacus (bodies unburied) and how crassus' death was a sort of death knell for that iteration of rome which was already something of a bloated corpse.

it's good to be back and thinking about spartacus, I took a brief detour a year and a half ago to get through an absolute brick of a book on sparta/lakonia and then picked up the broad topic of athens to pin down some thoughts on thrace, especially around how greece/rome perceived thracians and it's been. well. hm. so! speaking of thracians, pentheus!

The Allure and Repulsion of Thracians, Despoina Tsaifakis

which of course can bring us back to crassus

Dionysiac Tragedy in Plutarch, Crassus, David Braund

if you actually understood Palestine for what it is (the theft of land, resources, colonialism, indigenous resistance, anti imperialism), you can see the connecting lines everywhere. In my opinion, this should be the most crucial info you carry in any Palestine activism you do - Palestine is not unique and that’s what makes it so horrifying. As a Palestinian I really implore people to reject any sort of exceptionalism, its incredibly harmful to other victims of genocide (most notably I see this with Sudan, DRC, and it reeks of anti-blackness) and its harmful to us as Palestinians as well. There is literally nothing to be gained from pointing at other genocides and going ‘well this one is worse’.