@edithmayhallさんのイラストまとめ

The not-all-that-familiar French painter Thomas Couture was born December 21st 1815. 'The Romans in Their Decadence' illustrated his premonition of lockdown parties at No. 10 Downing Street two centuries later. I like the man worried that the statue's getting thirsty (top right)

On UN #mountainday I can't help imagining what the Muses of Helicon would have sounded like if Apollo had access to a Helicon Bb Bass horn rather than a lyre.

On UN #internationaldayofviolenceagainstwomen here's what Hercules had coming after assaulting the Amazon Queen.

It's not easy trying to cram the entire miserable population of Troy watching Hector's corpse being abused in Iliad 22-4 into one painting, but Etienne Barthélemy Garnier did it in about 1830. Priam, Andromache, Astyanax, Cassandra, Hecuba, Helen, Helenus and plenty of Trojans

Athena v Poseidon for tutelage of Athens (Constantin Hansen, vestibule of Copenhagen Uni). If 7th Earl Elgin hadn't smashed up Pheidias' west pediment of the Parthenon the world might have more than Poseidon's torso from the ancient master's visualisation of the epic scene @bcrpm

Yet another artist cops out of portraying the incredible designs Hephaestus put on Achilles' shield, which took Homer 130 lines to describe. But I like that C.W. Eckersberg was in 1807 sensitive to the detail about Briseis' despair at Patroclus' death.

3 days after my Vilnius talk on Achilles' Iliadic shield, it's the 170th anniversary of Melville's uber-Homeric novel Moby-Dick. The ultra-Achillean Captain Ahab's golden doubloon, nailed to his mast, is a direct response to the shield in the Iliad. But Gregory Peck was miscast!

On #WorldHeartDay2021 here's the undisputed father of cardiology, Erasistratus. By performing dissections in his Alexandrian medical school c. 270 BCE he was the first to see that the heart was not the seat of emotions but a pump & to describe all its valves

Does anyone have access to today's Telegraph who could tweet me a photo of my review of the Gold of the Great Steppes exhibition at the Fitzwilliam? Getting into our local supermarket to buy a newspaper is made very difficult by the queues for petrol!

On World Tourism day who else but Pausanias. His 20-year travels produced the 10-book guidebook quoted in or imitated by every modern one. We owe him much, e.g. the appearance of Pheidas' statue of Zeus at Olympia. But he was heartbroken never to find the singing fish of Kleitor