Polyphemus Gives Odysseus’s Men a Hand

Design Some­thing Every­day: 12/365

Here’s a lit­tle sketch for my design some­thing every day project. Imag­ine your­self as one of clever Odysseus’ men in the cave of the Cyclops, and one-eyed Polyphe­mus, son of Posei­don, reaches down to devour you, or as Samuel But­ler grue­somely put it in his translation:

The cruel wretch vouch­safed me not one word of answer, but with a sud­den clutch he gripped up two of my men at once and dashed them down upon the ground as though they had been pup­pies. Their brains were shed upon the ground, and the earth was wet with their blood. Then he tore them limb from limb and supped upon them. He gob­bled them up like a lion in the wilder­ness, flesh, bones, mar­row, and entrails, with­out leav­ing any­thing uneaten.” — Homer, The Odyssey Book 9, trans. Samuel Butler.

Links:

The Odyssey, by Homer Trans­lated by Samuel But­ler via the Clas­sics Archive at MIT.
Free online audio ver­sion of the But­ler trans­la­tion of They Odyssey at Lib­rivox. Although it is great to read Homer, one should lis­ten to a good read­ing of his epics. Con­sid­er­ing that’s how most in the ancient world were exposed to them, I find it fun to lis­ten to them being read. It makes me feel like I am walk­ing in their shoes, er sandals.

A Map of the Underworld according Virgil’s Aeneid Rendered as a Subway Map

Design Some­thing Every­day 11/365: In honor of my love of maps, infor­ma­tion graph­ics and Vir­gil, I decided to imag­ine Aeneas jour­ney as if it were a sub­way map. So enjoy. Don’t for­get your sub­way token’s for Charon!

I have always loved maps, as a child I would look at our world atlas and pon­der the far flung reaches of the globe. Then I dis­cov­ered a his­tor­i­cal atlas at my school and real­ized that maps could not only take you hor­i­zon­tally across the globe but also ver­ti­cally in to the dis­tant past.

A period I found par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing was the Roman Empire. I’d gaze at the maps show­ing the roads stretch­ing out from Rome like a web unit­ing the dis­parate cor­ners west­ern world under the the ban­ner of The Sen­ate and Peo­ple of Rome — SPQR.

The great poet Pub­lius Vergilius Maro, bet­ter known to us today as Vir­gil wrote his mas­ter­piece the Aeneid at the same time Rome was near­ing the apex of it’s power and con­fi­dence. This mag­nif­i­cent poem was writ­ten to, amongst other things, cre­ate a mythol­o­gized past for the Romans of the first cen­tury CE, par­tic­u­larly for Virgil’s patron, the Emperor Augus­tus. As such, the poem depicts the Romans  as a peo­ple not great at skill in art, des­tined to rule.

Let oth­ers bet­ter mold the run­ning mass
Of met­als, and inform the breath­ing brass,
And soften into flesh a mar­ble face;
Plead bet­ter at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars descend, and when they rise.
But, Rome, ‘t is thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Dis­pos­ing peace and war by thy own majes­tic way;
To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free:
These are impe­r­ial arts, and wor­thy thee.“
–The Aeneid, Book 6 Trans­lated by John Dryden

This pas­sage takes place dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between Aeneas and his dead father Ancheises in the under­world. This is direct allu­sion to Homer and The Odyssey. In Homer’s work must his hero Odysseus must visit a cave where he will sum­mon the dead seer Tire­sias (amongst other dead celebs). By doing this he will gain the knowl­edge to com­pete his quest and finally reach the far shores of Ithica.

In the Aeneid, Aeneas has the same quest but he actu­ally has to travel through the land of the dead, instead of just wait­ing at the gate like Odysseus. This is one of the most impor­tant and vivid parts of the poem. His jour­ney has inspired artists and poets for cen­turies, now it has inspired a daily design and under­world sub­way map!

Links & Sources:

• The basic out­line of the map was taken from Alice K. Turner’s truly amaz­ing book A His­tory of Hell. It would be dev­il­ish of me not to rec­om­mend it.
• The Aeneid trans­lated by John Dry­den via The Inter­net Clas­sics Archive at MIT. The recent Robert Fagels trans­la­tion looks really good too.
• Free Audio Ver­sion of  The  Aeneid via Libravox.org (also the Dry­den ver­sion… yeah Pub­lic Domain!)
• Under­world & the After­life: A good arti­cle about Greco-Roman ideas of, well the under­world & the after­life via Car­los Parada of Greek Mythol­ogy Link. I used a lit­tle of this for the sub­way of the under­world map.

O Devine Poesy…

Mosaic of the Muses, Roman Museum of Sabratha, Libya. by Sebastià Giralt

Make this site live for us in its many bear­ings, O Muse…

In the great book “The War of Art” by Steven Press­field he details how he begins any cre­ative ven­ture by call­ing on the muses for suc­cess. He does this by recit­ing the open­ing lines from the T.E. Lawrence trans­la­tion of The Odyssey; when Homer calls on the muses to speak through him and aid him in recit­ing the tale of the return of clever Odysseus to Ithaca. This seems like a good idea to me, espe­cially for my first post. So here is my call on the nine muses for aid and inspi­ra­tion for this blog, port­fo­lio and podcast.

“O Divine Poesy, god­dess, daugh­ter of Zeus, sus­tain for me this song of the various-minded man, who, after he had plun­dered the inner­most citadel of hal­lowed Troy, was made to stray griev­ously about the coasts of men, the sport of their cus­toms, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea­far­ing, ached with an agony to redeem him­self and bring his com­pany safe home. Vain hope-for them. The fools! Their own wit­less­ness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, where­fore the Sun-god blot­ted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bear­ings, O Muse…”

- from the Odyssey, by Homer; Trans­lated by T.E. Lawrence