British Museunm

[Tony Smith]

For weeks or months I have been saying I shall go to the BM and see those marbles before they are sent back to Elgin.

Today I did so.

There are of course human figures (and anthropomorphic deities) centaurs and horses. What especially impressed me was the level of detail in the horses' manes.

The only time I was in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin it was being restored and only a few galleries - albeit very fine ones - were open. I ought to go back.

[Nick Odell]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2023 14:39:27 -0800 (PST), Tony Smith
<agsmit...@gmail.com> wrote:

>For weeks or months I have been saying I shall go to the BM and see those marbles before they are sent back to Elgin.
>
>Today I did so.
>
>There are of course human figures (and anthropomorphic deities) centaurs and horses. What especially impressed me was the level of detail in the horses' manes.
>

We went there a couple of years ago and also saw those galleries and
were astonished by the detail - although I don't specifically remember
the horses' manes above the rest.

It was a sober reminder to me that two-and-a-half thousand years is
nothing really in the scheme of things. The frieze was made by modern
men just like us, with the same imagination and creativity as us but
with maybe fewer tools to express that with.

>The only time I was in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin it was being restored and only a few galleries - albeit very fine ones - were open. I ought to go back.

Nick

[Wenlock]

I was disappointed with those marbles. No aggies, alleys, ollies or devil’s
eyes. Nothing you could really call a dobber or even a taw. No idea what
rules they played to - although Lord Elgin clearly cried “keepsies” at some
point.

[Tony Smith]

The story of the battle of the Centaurs and the (human) Lapiths is that the (males) centaurs invited to a Lapith wedding party got drunk and tried to ravish the bride and other Lapith girls. As portrayed in the Marbles, the centaurs had their genitalia where a horse would, but they were of the shape and size of human "bits". So ravishing a human woman would have been geometrically possible.