Greek/Roman History Lesson

Sunday (that's yesterday at this point) was pretty boring. I went to Le Palais Royal and chilled out in the gardens for a while. Yes, I'm a sucker for any picture which has a bird in it.

There were some nice statues etc to play with.

This girl tried so hard to jump onto this post (each one is a little higher than the last):

She was taking longer and longer running leaps to try and reach the top. She was a little scared though and always slowed down a lot at the last moment. Her little brother was being annoying to the effect of "just do it" and doing it over and over again to drive home the point. Finally she watched carefully how he did it & then got it first try. She was so happy that she just sat there for a while and watched the world go by.

It's a little strange to me that these grounds were preserved during the revolution, as they were essentially the private grounds of the king. They turned his residences into the Louvre museum, but left this untouched & somewhat strangely organized. Well, if they decided to preserve it I'll trust their judgement.

The Louvre

Then I went to the Musée du Louvre. This is still in Paris by the way.

Which was busy.

I took mostly boring museum pictures and I won't bore you with too many. Also I was really tired at the end. But here was my favourite Greek statue:

That's Athena, or Minerva to the Romans. She's the goddess of the moon, the hunt, girls before they come of age, and of wisdom. Athena was always my favourite in the Greek pantheon since she was "born" by springing in full battle gear straight from Zeus's head. Not quite sure how that works but it's probably painful haha.

Most of the Greek statues here were reproductions from the original Parthenon building in Athens, or in many cases reproductions of medieval reproductions (because the originals have been lost). Very cool to see.

Also, here's the Apple of Discord, held by Aphrodite. It looks pretty small but I guess that's the natural size of Mediterranean apples without genetic engineering. This apple was the real cause of the thousand ships and the Trojan war. Beauty isn't a problem, only beauty contests are.

OK, enough about Greeks. Romans aren't as photogenic :(

unless they dress up (this of course is Augustus)

but their real power was economic, so what we should really be talking about is money.

I'm pretty fascinated by the way they made money actually (maybe because of studying bitcoins). One has to assume they had circular molds for the coins and the unevenness is due to weathering over the ages. Or not, since the embossing is so well preserved. Guys, a circle is pi r squared. The Greeks figured that one out, go look it up.

Speaking of which, I never really knew what happened between Alexander the Great's (Greek) empire and the rise of Rome. I kinda just assumed it passed from one to the other. But there were a whole series of other empires in between... who knew.

On an end note:

-- taking a picture of the ceiling with everyone surrounding it. This was cause for much amusement and exclamation in Mandarin. One poor guy had to reach down slowly and press the button without getting his head out of the picture.