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Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)

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Simon_Jester said:
Just for the record, an amusing observation. In The Courtship of Ploutos, the demi-goddess created by Aphrodite to match Ploutos? Nomisnia? Pretty sure from the name that she's meant to be a goddess of coins and money, specifically... and that she doesn't actually officially exist.

We'd be inventing a new goddess.

I think this is kind of cool actually.
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Well, it is not she is appearing out of thin air either. These festivals are all based off of local myths.

Just as Zeus will still be worshipped if the Poseidon festival wins, so will Nomisnia.

So you need not fear that she will stop existing if we do not vote for her.
 
Sivantic said:
Well, it is not she is appearing out of thin air either. These festivals are all based off of local myths.

Just as Zeus will still be worshipped if the Poseidon festival wins, so will Nomisnia.

So you need not fear that she will stop existing if we do not vote for her.
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I mean I like the idea that we might effectively invent a minor Greek goddess whom IRL nobody's ever heard of, but who ends up being heard of because she shows up in Eretrian festivals for centuries.

Godwinson said:
Ah, yes, Ariadne Nomisnia, a real goddess of the mint, yep yep, everything is in order here.
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This opens the interesting possibility that The Courtship of Ploutos originated as an Eretrian play that was intended as a very indirect satire of the affairs (heh) of Timaeus and Ariadne Ianedar, but whose origins have since been partially or entirely lost.

The Sandman said:
It's an interesting but little known fact that Nomisnia is also the goddess of disguises, fake beards, and open secrets.
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Leukos the Accoutant, grumbling over a scroll he bought in an estate sale:

"Also encryption. DAMMIT."
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Just for the record, an amusing observation. In The Courtship of Ploutos, the demi-goddess created by Aphrodite to match Ploutos? Nomisnia? Pretty sure from the name that she's meant to be a goddess of coins and money, specifically... and that she doesn't actually officially exist. We'd be inventing a new goddess. I think this is kind of cool actually.
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I imagine that @Cetashwayo was inspired in naming by Nomisma.
 
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Droman said:
I imagine that @Cetashwayo was inspired in naming by Nomisma.
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Uh, yes, that was my point.

Basically, "Nomismia" is totally in keeping with the ancient Greek tradition of personifying abstract concepts or nonliving things as deities or lesser spirits. Sort of the way Japan does only with more shrines and less moe-cutesiness.

Nomismia works, she's in keeping with ancient Greek culture, more or less.

It's just that when I did a search, I could not find any examples of the ancient Greeks actually specifically creating a deity or demigoddess or what have you specifically to personify money. So she'd be something the Eretrians made up, which I think is kind of cool.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Uh, yes, that was my point.

Basically, "Nomismia" is totally in keeping with the ancient Greek tradition of personifying abstract concepts or nonliving things as deities or lesser spirits. Sort of the way Japan does only with more shrines and less moe-cutesiness.

Nomismia works, she's in keeping with ancient Greek culture, more or less.

It's just that when I did a search, I could not find any examples of the ancient Greeks actually specifically creating a deity or demigoddess or what have you specifically to personify money. So she'd be something the Eretrians made up, which I think is kind of cool.
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Yeah, it's just going to be really weird when all our statuary of Nomismia looks like Ianedar, who was definitely a boy.
 
Well at least it had nothing to do with any sort of argument relating to the quest?

Early-Spring
Mid-Spring [Vote]
Late-Spring
Early-Summer
Mid-Summer
Late-Summer
Early-Autumn
Mid-Autumn
Late-Autumn
Early-Winter
Mid-Winter [Vote]
Late-Winter

This is the current calender with the current festivals crossed out. So we have a lot of spots left.

I have heard that people are saying that the Festival of Persephone should in Autumn, when she returns to live with Hades, but that spot is already taken by the Running of the Weasels.

I also would like to remind people that it is not really something we can move quite so easily
Cetashwayo said:
A mid-winter festival is very common among many peoples of the Mediterranean, and a number of proposed festivals or already-celebrated ones have emerged to account for this, whilst it would be wise also to have a festival in mid-spring to celebrate the vernal equionox. To that end, there are a number of folk festivals to draw on.
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These are all celebrations already taking place, not really something we can move half a year over, add that to the fact that it is Spring that is related to new life rather than Autumn.

"Well why not just move it over to late or early spring?" I can already see you guys ask. I answer with the mid-spring being the true moment when Persephone is leaving her husband as early spring is still cold, and late spring misses the moment when the temp begins to rise.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Sorry, missed this earlier, the answer would be no. There really isn't much inertia for this move given citizens always marry in.
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I feared as much though I had hoped that with increased relations between our cities and thus people meeting and befriending each other there would be some interested in their friends daughter/sister or cementing an economic alliance/friendship.
 
Star said:
Festival celebrating marriage between Hades and Persephone with mother daughter relationship by side? In wich we can organise mass weddings with mothers escorting their daughters to the groom?
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Yeah, I think something like that could be really cool!

Sivantic said:
I am not in agreement. First of all the festival of Ploutos has nothing to do with spring. It really has nothing to with any of the seasons. Yet at the same time, as a largely mercantile state we are always going to pay respects to the gods and goddesses of wealth. So I really do not see this being a one time only deal.
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Ah, that's understandable.

The issue with the festival of Ploutos isn't seasonality, it's that it's explicitly a minor festival. Ploutos is not a one of the most important Olympians, and Nomisnia is a demigoddess who is mostly worshiped in Eretria. The harvest festival slot is for a major festival, which the Courting of Ploutos would not really satisfy.

So with a lot of confidence, I am going to say this is by far our best chance of picking it up, and furthermore, that there is zero chance it will be an option for the harvest festival.

Sivantic said:
I also do not agree that it would be a festival that involves the whole community. Will everyone participate? Yes. It is a festival, of course everyone is going to want to join, but who will be the focus?

The rich and widowed.

The push for recognition and acceptance will be hard enough as is without adding class differences into the mix.

Let it not be a celebration of aristocratic women and one poor woman, but a celebration of women of all classes and their families!
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So, I've said before that I don't dislike the festival of Persephone, and I'm not going to knock it, but there are some misconceptions here.

The Courting of Ploutos celebrates the rich and the windowed, but the distinction there is important. The widow of a local baker is not quite the same as a female aristocrat. Do you know what was one of the major ways for women to participate in business, often the only way, in pre-modernity?

By inheriting their husband's business.

If you're at all interested in the economics of female empowerment in history, or the lack thereof, it's not at all a minor thing. It's actually a pretty big deal.

Now, the Festival of Persephone is certainly all-inclusive, and supportive of traditional femininity, and I think it's great that we have a festival for women at all. It's a good festival, and there's no denying that. But it's supportive of women in their traditional role within the home, as the providers of children.

The Courting of Ploutos is supportive of women taking part in the public sphere, and when combined with the celebration of giving money given to poor women, that makes it more interesting to me.

Especially since we could still have a festival centering around Persephone and Demeter at harvest time, and make it an even bigger event.
 
Arminio said:
That was fast and unexpected
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Some acts of hubris are punished swiftly, as though by the thunderbolts of Zeus...

Sivantic said:
"Well why not just move it over to late or early spring?" I can already see you guys ask. I answer with the mid-spring being the true moment when Persephone is leaving her husband as early spring is still cold, and late spring misses the moment when the temp begins to rise.
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Your argument is now sufficiently detailed that we might reasonably need to ask details about the microclimate of the area around OTL Bari.

Do you have background on this subject?
 
Simon_Jester said:
Your argument is now sufficiently detailed that we might reasonably need to ask details about the microclimate of the area around OTL Bari.
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Bari is a Mediterranean climate with wet winters and dry summers. The record low is -5.9 degrees celsius for a sample collected from 1971-2000 by the weather data from the Servizio Meteorlogica. Given our knowledge that this period (the 4th and 5th cenuries BCE) was not appreciably warmer than today thanks to the description of the behavior of palm tree growth in Greece from a period author, and accounting for the relatively small rise in temperature from 1971-2000 compared to that period (as opposed to the bigger rise happening now), and keeping in mind cities as heat islands and so on, we can probably guess very roughly that Bari never really fell below -10 C celsius, while experiencing sweltering record highs of about 44.8 which we could reduce to about 30 degrees on average during the summer, and about 5 degrees on average in the winter.
 
Erandil said:
I feared as much though I had hoped that with increased relations between our cities and thus people meeting and befriending each other there would be some interested in their friends daughter/sister or cementing an economic alliance/friendship.
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Well I think the problem is obviously that the value of these relationships is superseded by the fact that you're consigning your children to metic-hood.
 
The major festival slot we have left to decide on is around the harvest. Persephone's mother is Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest.

Autumn is also when Persephone goes to live with her husband for the winter, and her mother mourns her. Harvest time marks the start of of the liminal phase between summer and winter, where the bounty of summer is stored against the cold of winter. This would culminate in Samhain, but I don't know that the Greeks celebrate that.

So a Harvest Festival centered around Persephone going to live under the ground, celebrating her Divine Union with Hades, but also the sadness of her mother Demeter at losing her daughter, would make perfect sense I think. It would be interesting in that although it's putatively another Divine Marriage festival, a lot of the core of it would really be about the mother-daughter relationship of Persephone and Demeter, the bittersweet feeling of a mother seeing her daughter married.

There's a lot of power to that, I think, and two women-centered festivals would be great.
 
[X] [Spring] The Courting of Ploutos. A more humorous and commercially oriented women's festival, the courting of Ploutos tells the story of Ploutos' attempts to flee from the bounds of marriage and love in favor of commerce. Celebrated in Eretria as the source of the city's trade wealth, Ploutos is surprisingly popular among widows and wealthy women because of this particular tale's affirmation of the importance of women to wealth. After fleeing from every potential mate, Aphrodite grows incredibly frustrated and crafts Nomisnia, a demigoddess who is good at creating wealth as Ploutos; the two immediately become competitors, further frustrating her. Finally, at last, Hermes intervenes, and convinces the two that they would have double the wealth if they were married, and at last the two accept, finding love in mutual success at business. The festival is celebrated through a dramatic re-enactment, dances between lovers, and a literal shower of drachmas given to the poorest women of the city.

A final vote change, I think, since the argument seems to have descended into whether we can choose the other in the future, a very tangential issue IMO.
 
Admiral Skippy said:
Yeah, I think something like that could be really cool!



Ah, that's understandable.

The issue with the festival of Ploutos isn't seasonality, it's that it's explicitly a minor festival. Ploutos is not a one of the most important Olympians, and Nomisnia is a demigoddess who is mostly worshiped in Eretria. The harvest festival slot is for a major festival, which the Courting of Ploutos would not really satisfy.

So with a lot of confidence, I am going to say this is by far our best chance of picking it up, and furthermore, that there is zero chance it will be an option for the harvest festival.



So, I've said before that I don't dislike the festival of Persephone, and I'm not going to knock it, but there are some misconceptions here.

The Courting of Ploutos celebrates the rich and the windowed, but the distinction there is important. The widow of a local baker is not quite the same as a female aristocrat. Do you know what was one of the major ways for women to participate in business, often the only way, in pre-modernity?

By inheriting their husband's business.

If you're at all interested in the economics of female empowerment in history, or the lack thereof, it's not at all a minor thing. It's actually a pretty big deal.

Now, the Festival of Persephone is certainly all-inclusive, and supportive of traditional femininity, and I think it's great that we have a festival for women at all. It's a good festival, and there's no denying that. But it's supportive of women in their traditional role within the home, as the providers of children.

The Courting of Ploutos is supportive of women taking part in the public sphere, and when combined with the celebration of giving money given to poor women, that makes it more interesting to me.

Especially since we could still have a festival centering around Persephone and Demeter at harvest time, and make it an even bigger event.
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I am constantly irked by how it keeps getting pushed that because the Festival of Persephone is supportive of traditional roles that it is a step back and it is not. We are dealing with straight up misogyny here, the hatred of women. We have gotten word of Cet on that. The Festival would be about acknowledging women as being important, that the role of the housewife is not something to dismiss but a valuable and important part of society.

I have to fight this sort of thinking now, or else the exact same thing is going to get trotted out later.

You may think that is a step back from the modern day, but we are trying to start somewhere. The Festival of Ploutos is restrictive, it only celebrates women who already have money or those that managed to sneak property through loop holes. It is not about being supportive of women in the public sphere, it is of only acknowledging women of wealth. It is the safe option.

The way for further gender equality is not in the support of only those with money, the exceptions, but the support of as many women as possible. This is a democracy, we should not be trying to extend the hand to only to those in power, but women from all backgrounds, whether they be the wife of a fisherman or an aristocrat.

I never said that the Festival of Ploutos can fill in the Harvest festival, the list was to show that there are several slots it can fill throughout the year, including an Early Spring slot which should be near enough its original time to move. Look at the current vote, it is not like we would only be creating one festival at a time.
Simon_Jester said:
Your argument is now sufficiently detailed that we might reasonably need to ask details about the microclimate of the area around OTL Bari.

Do you have background on this subject?
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Well we are not really working with hard time slots since Cet only used terms like late Summer or mid Autumn so I could have only extrapolated that there must be some reason for that.
 
[X] [Spring] The Return of Persephone. Favored by many married women, the return of Persephone is a re-enaction of the drama of Persephone's departure from Hades. Having been married happily to Hades for six months of the year, for in this interpretation she is not kidnapped but seduced away from her domineering mother, the young Persephone must say goodbye to her beloved husband and lord of the underworld. Persephone is presented here as a traditional woman, but also an icon of femininity, beloved by many women in Eretria for giving them someone to look up to. Embued in mystery and icons of the dead, the Return of Persephone is a festival that celebrates the transition from winter to spring and from death to life, the birth of new children, and draws heavily from the Eleusinian mysteries near Athenai, that famed mystery cult.

I am but clay now, to be molded.

Can someone else please vote, and free me from this burden?
 
[X] [Spring] The Courting of Ploutos. A more humorous and commercially oriented women's festival, the courting of Ploutos tells the story of Ploutos' attempts to flee from the bounds of marriage and love in favor of commerce. Celebrated in Eretria as the source of the city's trade wealth, Ploutos is surprisingly popular among widows and wealthy women because of this particular tale's affirmation of the importance of women to wealth. After fleeing from every potential mate, Aphrodite grows incredibly frustrated and crafts Nomisnia, a demigoddess who is good at creating wealth as Ploutos; the two immediately become competitors, further frustrating her. Finally, at last, Hermes intervenes, and convinces the two that they would have double the wealth if they were married, and at last the two accept, finding love in mutual success at business. The festival is celebrated through a dramatic re-enactment, dances between lovers, and a literal shower of drachmas given to the poorest women of the city.
 
[X] [Spring] The Return of Persephone. Favored by many married women, the return of Persephone is a re-enaction of the drama of Persephone's departure from Hades. Having been married happily to Hades for six months of the year, for in this interpretation she is not kidnapped but seduced away from her domineering mother, the young Persephone must say goodbye to her beloved husband and lord of the underworld. Persephone is presented here as a traditional woman, but also an icon of femininity, beloved by many women in Eretria for giving them someone to look up to. Embued in mystery and icons of the dead, the Return of Persephone is a festival that celebrates the transition from winter to spring and from death to life, the birth of new children, and draws heavily from the Eleusinian mysteries near Athenai, that famed mystery cult.

I do think that publically and culturally enshrining the importance of women is a stronger foundation than celebrating the few who essentially side step the distaste for women and elevating them to cases of exceptionalism rather than the norm for their gender. It seems far too likely to end with a small minority of women to be celebrated, and for their successes to be used to justify the distaste for women by the 'failure' of most women to achieve those unique circumstances.
 
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