everything about this is fucking hilarious. i’m sorry, random pompeii man, but your death was some looney tunes bullshit and the framing of this photograph isn’t helping.
An Exotic Dancer Demonstrates That Her Underwear Was Too Large To Have Exposed Herself, After Undercover Police Officers Arrested Her In Florida
Dorothy Counts – The First Black Girl To Attend An All-White School In The United States – Being Teased And Taunted By Her White Male Peers At Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School, 1957
Austrian Boy Receives New Shoes During WWII
Jewish Prisoners After Being Liberated From A Death Train, 1945
The Graves Of A Catholic Woman And Her Protestant Husband, Holland, 1888
A Lone Man Refusing To Do The Nazi Salute, 1936
Job Hunting In 1930’s
German Soldiers React To Footage Of Concentration Camps, 1945
Residents Of West Berlin Show Children To Their Grandparents Who Reside On The Eastern Side, 1961
Acrobats Balance On Top Of The Empire State Building, 1934
Mafia Boss Joe Masseria Lays Dead On A Brooklyn Restaurant Floor Holding The Ace Of Spades, 1931
Lesbian Couple At Le Monocle, Paris, 1932
The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn Mchale Leapt To Her Death From The Empire State Building, 1947
The Remains Of The Astronaut Vladimir Komarov, A Man Who Fell From Space, 1967
Race Organizers Attempt To Stop Kathrine Switzer From Competing In The Boston Marathon. She Became The First Woman To Finish The Race, 1967
Harold Whittles Hearing Sound For The First Time, 1974
Nikola Tesla Sitting In His Laboratory With His “Magnifying Transmitter”
The fact that Julius Caesar burst into tears after reading about Alexander the Great because they were the same age but he could never live up to Alexander is one of the greatest things I’ve learnt as a classics student
it’s so…intensely weird to me that the divine comedy was written fiftyish years after the composition of the prose edda and almost simultaneously with the saga of the volsungs, that king edward i of england and king jaime i of aragon and the saint-king louis ix of france and kublai fucking khan all sat on their respective thrones during dante’s lifetime, that while he was living at lucca robert the bruce was crowned king of scotland, that he was five years younger than princess khutulun, that the children of hamelin disappeared when he was nineteen. all these events seem so remote and titanic that they’re semi-legendary in our cultural perception but he was contemporary with them, he lived in the same world that saw the collapse of the song dynasty and the founding of tenochtitlan, and that’s just. really strange to me.
Hello! A lot of the Roman rings I post could probably be worn by both men and women, depending on their time period.
Early in Roman history, men’s rings were mostly forged from iron and meant to be used as personal seals (source 1: Lacus Curtius). As time went on, Rome became exposed to new art forms and new materials through warfare and diplomacy. Gold and silver became options instead of iron.
Perhaps as a reaction against the influx of gold and silver, or perhaps to express political views, some late Republican men wore iron rings in order to express the austerity and simplicity associated with the early period. (source 1). Apparently Gaius Marius (157-86 BCE) only wore iron rings and never gold ones for this reason (source 1, from Pliny).
However, for a time in Roman history, only elite senators, magistrates, and equites could wear gold rings under the ius annuli aurei, or the right of the gold ring, so perhaps most upper-class men actually flaunted their ability to wear gold rings in order to express their status.
In the early empire, Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) granted the right to wear gold rings onto his favorites, but Tiberius (r. 14-37 CE) restricted the wearing of gold rings to those whose ancestors had had enough property (source 1). Septimius Severus (r. 193-211 CE) later granted his soldiers the right to wear gold rings, with freedmen and slaves permitted only silver or iron rings (source 2: Encyclopedia Britannica 1911). Under Justinian (r. 527-565 CE), all free male citizens were granted the right to wear gold rings, the law by then mostly abandoned (source 2). Thus the wearing of gold rings expressed different statuses over time, and men no doubt were eager to show off their social standing by wearing gold rings at times when it served their interests to do so.
Roman men also didn’t seem to have an issue wearing gemstones. Sulla (139-78 BCE) apparently wore a ring with an intaglio depicting the defeat of Jugurtha, and Augustus used an intaglio seal ring first with a sphinx and then with the head of Alexander the Great (source 1, both from Pliny). Roman intaglios are most always colorful, either made of glass or natural gemstone.
Certain rings were probably only worn by men, such as army rings. Here’s a silver ring that was made for a member of the I Italica, depicting a soldier with a shield, dated to the 1st to 2nd centuries CE. Here’s another ring that was made for a member of the II Traiana Fortis, engraved with the name of the legion, dated to the 2nd century CE. Finally, here is a silver ring with a carnelian intaglio dated to the 2nd to 3rd centuries CE that was made for a member of the XI Claudia, proving that both men and women would wear gemstones and intaglio rings. It’s interesting to note that all these rings are made out of silver, rather than gold, likely because these rings were constructed before it was permissible for soldiers to wear gold, and perhaps also because gold was simply more expensive to acquire.
Ultimately, I think that some believed Roman men should be constricted not by which jewelry they could or could not wear, but by how much. Roman men certainly wore rings, but Quintilian, a 1st century CE rhetorician, advised aspiring orators that “the hand should not be overloaded with rings, which should under no circumstances encroach upon the middle joint of the finger” (source 3: Quintilian, Institutia Oratoria IX.3.142, via Lacus Curtius). To be a successful orator, according to Quintilian, the less rings the better. Was this related to a belief that it wasn’t masculine to wear so much jewelry? Perhaps. But the fact that Quintilian had to specifically point out ring wearing implies that Roman men were in fact wearing lots of rings, at least at this point in the empire.
My cousin, all dressed up and about to go to some club: “hey can I borrow that that pink lipstick you were wearing the other day?”
Me, sitting cross-legged on a stool, trying to inhale the smoke of burning bay leaves in front of me because I want to see if you can get high on that shit since it’s rumoured that the priestess of Delphi used to do that, but no one is sure if it really worked, you know: “it’s on my desk”
My cousin: “okay… have… fun…”
I just realized I was subconsciously trying to recreate this painting
it’s sometimes hard to believe rasputin was real. like there’s no non-fucked up part of rasputin’s existence
did he do something problematic i thought he was just russia’s greatest love machine
basic (true) story: fanatical russian monk who has almost never shaved or washed and smells like goats shows up at the russian capital with a creepy look on his beardy face and everyone just assumes he’s a prophet or a saint because he’s got a cult following that believes he can cure illnesses. his stans are sexually obsessed with him and he gets just a fuckton of russian pussy wherever he goes cause apparently he can cure his true believers of illness with god-given dick magic. russia’s queen has him come stay at the palace and sets him up in luxury because she thinks he can cure her son’s haemophilia with the power of russian goat jesus, and they
(allegedly)
become lovers, probably, ‘cause she craves that unwashed goat-scented dick like the rest of his cult which she now
(allegedly)
belongs to.
then the worst assassins in the history of assassinations try to assassinate him, because all of russia is slutshaming the queen he has too much power over the royal family and it’s helping revolutionaries turn people against the royals. so these idiots have him round for tea and cakes which are poisoned with cyanide, but he is magically unaffected by poison they get the dose wrong and he doesn’t die, and then he drinks three glasses of wine, which are also poisoned, and he doesn’t die, so they tell him to look at a crucifix and shoot him in the chest with a revolver when he isn’t looking, and he doesn’t die, but they think he’s dead so one of them dresses in his clothes and gets driven to his apartment to make it look like he’s gone home to hide the crime, and when they come back he gets up and attacks them, so they stab him in the side with a knife, and he doesn’t die, and then he frees himself and runs outside, so they shoot him a few times more, including in the forehead, and they wrap his body up and chuck him in the icy river, and he doesn’t go into the water, so his body is found on the ice the next day. and get this…. he died…. of hypothermia.
additionally, everyone who wasnt in the party of getting rid of rasputin was pretty bummed out when they found him and his miracle dick dead the next day and there was a pretty bangin funeral of which the royal family themselves attended. however after the tsar was overthrown a few month later they exhumed his body and burned it because the new leadership was very adamant about making sure there were no ties left to honor the old monarchy. however this dudes body had never been properly prepped for a cremation which meant that under the extreme heat his tendons and ligaments began to retract and shrink causing his dead body to move and twitch around as if still animate. according to some testimony his body actually sat up straight on the pyre, and at least one spectator fired a gun at the body and another may have allegedly died of shock.
backup blog in case tumblr explodes 