Please remember that when M. Lucius Nobilior brought back the "Muses"  from
Ambrakia in 187 BC, the statues were placed under the protection of Hercules in
Circus Flamineus .  The tem[ple was called Aedes Herculis Musarum and was
restored by the step-father of Augustus,  mentioned in Cicero's Pro Archia and
is the subject of the last poem of Ovid's Fasti I own a 16th C engraving of
Hercules driving envy from the temple of the Muses.  At least for the Romans
Hercules had a real connection with the Arts. tpr

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> Yes, I am so assuming, although if we (homo sapiens) evolved more toward
> the southern part of Africa we were probably not as black as Oroonoko but
> more like the San people. The reason I assume Europeans bleached out,
> either in Europe itself or during the time they were making their way
> slowly out of Africa and into the steppes from which they and one sort of
> future Asian both branched out (says a recent book on DNA and early
> migration) is simply that people without much melanin in their skins are
> more subject to damage from ultra violet. Of course after we lost our nice
> chimp fur we may have spent some time getting blacker. Since skin doesn't
> fossilize there's no way one can prove anything about ancient skin color,
> I do admit. What I would want to tell Mrs. Behn and the others remains the
> same: the DNA evidence suggests that we are all descended from Africans,
> finally (unless one wants to go back to the originary bacterium, of
> course).
>      On Hercules: the epigram from Alciato is wonderful and a reminder
> that in one of his guises Hercules--the Gallic one--was indeed famed
> for eloquence. I wonder if there is anything on his "proles" in
> Erasmus. Hercules was unusually good at making offspring, of course,
> having begotten how many--fifty?--kids in one night. Whether the kids
> were talented is, I guess, another question.
>      Two queries: does anybody on the list know of parallels to
> Contemplations mount other than St. John's vision on Patmos and that
> scene in Tasso? I don't include Bat(e)man's picture of a redcross
> knight gazing across the water at a heavenly city because there's no
> mount. The reason I ask is that I found a French poem in which David
> goes up the "Mont de Contemplation" and sees the New Jerusalem. Is
> there a lot of this sort of thing around? Other hills named
> "Contemplation" or at least with a hermit so named? I need this for
> an (overdue) essay and could use the help.
>      Second query: has anybody ever written on, even briefly, a poem by
> Samuel Rowlands (I think--I forgot to print out the bibliographical
> info) in a book called "Pasquils Palinodia (1619) that begins "Lo, I
> the man whose Muse whilome did play / A horne-pipe both to Country
> and the Citty, / Am no againe enjoyn'd to sing or say, / And tune my
> crowde unto another ditty, / To comfort Moone-fac'd Cuckolds, that
> were sad, . . ." Yes, the lines rang a bell with me, too, and I
> suspect Spenser, not the cancelled lines by (or not by) Virgil, are
> what's being sent up here. Anne (Prescott)
>
> > In a message dated 11/28/2003 3:39:06 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> > [log in to unmask] writes:
> > the first
> > Europeans were almost certainly black.
> >     This is a sidelight, and a bit trivial...but you are assuming that the
> > first Africans were black.  This was not necessarily so.
> >
> > MRS
> >