Mountain come to me

[sovay]

And today Tybalt Autolycus Taaffe, aged seven months and two days, previously thwarted in his quest for the last ginger lemongrass macaron, completed his successful ascent of Mount Refrigerator and was found gnawing on the container at the summit, with the macaron in question inside.

He was summarily removed from Mount Refrigerator, protesting loudly all the while. So was the macaron, although more quietly. A second ascent was later completed by the two-party team of Taaffe and Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, by which time the macaron had been eaten by someone who was not a cat. Descent has not yet been completed without human interference assistance.

Further bulletins as chaos warrants.

Comments

[sovay]

P.S. Macaronic mosaic. The horse is trying to eat Hermes' ginger-lemongrass petasus.

Whoa, wait, what? They confirmed that the bones in Vergina Tomb II are Philip II's? I missed this completely!

Okay, I don't know who the "Skythian King Athea" is, but if a woman is buried beside Philip with her weapons, I hope she's Audate.

[edit] Derp: he's this guy. Looking elsewhere for information about the woman:

"With the identity of the king's bones confirmed, the researchers have turned to an even more elusive mystery: what is the identity of the woman buried alongside Philip II? It is well known that Philip II took several wives during his lifetime, but analysis of the bones has demonstrated that they belong to a woman who died at around 32, much older than any of Philip II's other wives. Even more mysterious is the array of greaves, spears and arrows that are associated with the female skeleton, suggesting that she was a warrior in life."

I think until anyone proves otherwise, I shall believe that Audate took a pair of greaves off some Scythian in battle, because Illyrian women fought.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

...because Illyrian women fought.

And damned well, if she made it to 32 with honor.

Nine

[sovay]

And damned well, if she made it to 32 with honor.

Well, she must have lived into her daughter's adolescence if she was to have trained Kynnane as Kynanne trained her own daughter Adeia Eurydike. The dates I could find for her were all estimations—she married Philip in 359 or 358 BCE, either before or after his defeat of the Illyrian king Bardyllis to whom Audate is usually assumed (but not known) to have been closely related; sealing an alliance. It's similarly assumed she was dead by 337 because the dynastic name Eurydike was given to Philip's last wife Kleopatra in that year and Audate had been given the name herself on her marriage. So if you assume she was roughly Olympias' age, going by their close marriage dates, she could have died in her late thirties shortly before Philip's last wedding. Or it could have happened earlier, and I'll never find out, because this entire bracket of history is full of women men didn't see and therefore didn't write anything about.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

died at around 32, much older than any of Philip II's other wives.

I thought Olympias made it to her late 50s... (Not that this is her, of course, but still.)

[sovay]

I thought Olympias made it to her late 50s... (Not that this is her, of course, but still.)

She did; I've heard her birth year estimated between 375 and 371 BCE and she died in 316. I have those dates off the top of my head because I thought at first the article was confusedly attempting to claim the tomb's occupant was "older than any of Philip's other wives at the time of his death," but shortly realized that wouldn't work, either, because Olympias at her youngest would have been in her mid-thirties by then. Not to mention I have no idea of the birth dates of any of his other wives—Audate, Phila, Nikesipolis, Philinna, Meda, Kleopatra—and even if you want to assume he skewed younger with each marriage, it's not known in which years he married some of them. Unless I am stupidly misreading the sentence, I am guessing this is a case either of the article's author garbling something they were told or just having no idea what they were talking about.

(What mostly interested me was the array of weaponry. And when I read "horsewoman-archer close to Philip," I think of the woman who taught her daughter to ride and hunt and fight on the field of battle and lead men in war, as she would teach her daughter after her. It's true that one of Philip's other wives was Thracian, a horse-riding people; two more were from Thessaly, where they were supposed to breed the best horses in Greece; and I know nothing about Elimeia, but Audate's daughter is the one who took an army with her into Asia after Alexander's death. And all sources say she learned from her mother.)