Porphyrio Porphyrio

This blog has not died, lest visitors be concerned. It has merely been itself off visiting, in places where feeble wifi and feebler equipment planning, have made silence the easier course.

I feel I should have something serious on which to report - like Mary Beard on the Cambridge candidates' pool and birthday pig-sticking.

But only one thought has arrived today so far, the peculiar pleasure of seeing that beautiful big-footed, big-flapping bird, the purple moorhen, on the filthy shores of Lake Mareotis this morning; and then seeing the same bird (porphyrio porphyrio for those who care) in the mosaic floor of a Roman villa in Alexandria this afternoon.

In the marsh it was plashing about with its wide red toes, a more comfortable means of travel for a waterbird without webbbed feet although can still swim well when required. When it flies, it looks always as though it has never flown before although, once again, this exemplarily spirited creature can cover long distances.

In the mosaic, at the so-called Villa of the Birds beside Egypt's best preserved Roman theatre, it is looking down at its food as though about to hold its prey in place for a strike. The Romans kept these birds as spectacular pets and did not eat them as a rule. I am not sure what the practice is in Alexandria today.   

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

In "The Natural History of Pompeii" (Jashemski), page 380, on Nilotic scenes, MOSAIC: "Tammisto's (1997: 65) suggestion that moorhens are shown in the Nile mosaic in the House of the Faun is implausible owing to the figures' lobed toes (see 'Fulica atra')."

Perhaps Mary has already resolved this matter.

[Clayton Burns]

'A Maecenas for the Internet Age,' by Sam Sacks, on Denis Dutton. Wall Street Journal, today:

"The 108-year-old Times Literary Supplement, the leading periodical of the Anglophone literary world, has only 32,000 subscribers. For all these magazines, [Arts & Letters Daily] was a godsend."

I would like to suggest a Roman innovation: a new weekend section WSJ TLS (incorporated into the paper's format instead of being a TLS-style supplement).

That would generate traffic for Sir Peter's blog, and give much more publicity to the purple moorhen.

The TLS will never achieve its American potential with its current practices. This innovation would also be one sure way of dealing with the New York conspiracy (attempts to frig with TLS's distribution network). Such as it is.