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Publius Vergilius Maro ( Classical Latin: [ˈpuː.blɪ.ʊs wɛrˈɡɪ.lɪ.ʊs ˈma.roː]; traditional dates October 15, 70 BC - September 21, 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the (or Bucolics), the , and the epic .

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Quintus Horatius Flaccus ( Classical Latin: [ˈkʷiːntʊs(h)ɔˈraːtiʊsˈfɫakːʊs]; 8 December 65 BC - 27 November 8 BC[citation needed ]), commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."

Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses ( and ) and caustic iambic poetry (). The hexameters are amusing yet serious works, friendly in tone, leading the ancient satirist Persius to comment: "as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings".

His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from a republic to an empire. An officer in the republican army defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was "a master of the graceful sidestep") but for others he was, in John Dryden's phrase, "a well-mannered court slave".

Horatii Flacci Sermonum (1577)

Horace can be regarded as the world's first autobiographer. In his writings, he tells us far more about himself, his character, his development, and his way of life, than any other great poet of antiquity. Some of the biographical material contained in his work can be supplemented from the short but valuable "Life of Horace" by Suetonius (in his Lives of the Poets).

He was born on 8 December 65 BC in the Samnite south of Italy. His home town, Venusia, lay on a trade route in the border region between Apulia and Lucania ( Basilicata). Various Italic dialects were spoken in the area and this perhaps enriched his feeling for language. He could have been familiar with Greek words even as a young boy and later he poked fun at the jargon of mixed Greek and Oscan spoken in neighbouring Canusium. One of the works he probably studied in school was the Odyssia of Livius Andronicus, taught by teachers like the ' Orbilius' mentioned in one of his poems. Army veterans could have been settled there at the expense of local families uprooted by Rome as punishment for their part in the Social War (91-88 BC). Such state-sponsored migration must have added still more linguistic variety to the area. According to a local tradition reported by Horace, a colony of Romans or Latins had been installed in Venusia after the Samnites had been driven out early in the third century. In that case, young Horace could have felt himself to be a Roman though there are also indications that he regarded himself as a Samnite or Sabellus by birth. Italians in modern and ancient times have always been devoted to their home towns, even after success in the wider world, and Horace was no different. Images of his childhood setting and references to it are found throughout his poems.

Horace's father was probably a Venutian taken captive by Romans in the Social War, or possibly he was descended from a Sabine captured in the Samnite Wars. Either way, he was a slave for at least part of his life. He was evidently a man of strong abilities however and managed to gain his freedom and improve his social position. Thus Horace claimed to be the free-born son of a prosperous 'coactor'. The term 'coactor' could denote various roles, such as tax collector, but its use by Horace was explained by scholia as a reference to 'coactor argentareus' i.e. an auctioneer with some of the functions of a banker, paying the seller out of his own funds and later recovering the sum with interest from the buyer.

The father spent a small fortune on his son's education, eventually accompanying him to Rome to oversee his schooling and moral development. The poet later paid tribute to him in a poem that one modern scholar considers the best memorial by any son to his father. The poem includes this passage:

If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no one can accuse me of greed, or of prurience, or of profligacy, if I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment, my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my father deserves all the credit... As it is now, he deserves from me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to apologize for being a freedman's son. Satires 1.6.65-92

He never mentioned his mother in his verses and he might not have known much about her. Perhaps she also had been a slave.

Horace left Rome, possibly after his father's death, and continued his formal education in Athens, a great centre of learning in the ancient world, where he arrived at nineteen years of age, enrolling in The Academy. Founded by Plato, The Academy was now dominated by Epicureans and Stoics, whose theories and practises made a deep impression on the young man from Venusia. Meanwhile, he mixed and lounged about with the elite of Roman youth, such as Marcus, the idle son of Cicero, and the Pompeius to whom he later addressed a poem. It was in Athens too that he probably acquired deep familiarity with the ancient tradition of Greek lyric poetry, at that time largely the preserve of grammarians and academic specialists (access to such material was easier in Athens than in Rome, where the public libraries had yet to be built by Asinius Pollio and Augustus).

Rome's troubles following the assassination of Julius Caesar were soon to catch up with him. Marcus Junius Brutus came to Athens seeking support for the republican cause. Brutus was fêted around town in grand receptions and he made a point of attending academic lectures, all the while recruiting supporters among the young men studying there, including Horace. An educated young Roman could begin military service high in the ranks and Horace was made tribunus militum (one of six senior officers of a typical legion), a post usually reserved for men of senatorial or equestrian rank and which seems to have inspired jealousy among his well-born confederates. He learned the basics of military life while on the march, particularly in the wilds of northern Greece, whose rugged scenery became a backdrop to some of his later poems. It was there in 42 BC that Octavian (later Augustus) and his associate Mark Antony crushed the republican forces at the Battle of Philippi. Horace later recorded it as a day of embarrassment for himself, when he fled without his shield, but allowance should be made for his self-deprecating humour. Moreover, the incident allowed him to identify himself with some famous poets who had long ago abandoned their shields in battle, notably his heroes Alcaeus and Archilochus. The comparison with the latter poet is uncanny: Archilochus lost his shield in a part of Thrace near Philippi, and he was deeply involved in the Greek colonization of Thasos, where Horace's die-hard comrades finally surrendered.

Octavian offered an early amnesty to his opponents and Horace quickly accepted it. On returning to Italy, he was confronted with yet another loss: his father's estate in Venusia was one of many throughout Italy to be confiscated for the settlement of veterans ( Virgil lost his estate in the north about the same time). Horace later claimed that he was reduced to poverty and this led him to try his hand at poetry. In reality, there was no money to be had from versifying. At best, it offered future prospects through contacts with other poets and their patrons among the rich. Meanwhile, he obtained the sinecure of scriba quaestorius, a civil service position at the aerarium or Treasury, profitable enough to be purchased even by members of the ordo equester and not very demanding in its work-load, since tasks could be delegated to scribae or permanent clerks. It was about this time that he began writing his Satires and Epodes.

He describes in glowing terms the country villa which his patron, Maecenas, had given him in a letter to his friend Quintius:

"It lies on a range of hills, broken by a shady valley which is so placed that the sun when rising strikes the right side, and when descending in his flying chariot, warms the left. You would like the climate; and if you were to see my fruit trees, bearing ruddy cornils and plums, my oaks and ilex supplying food to my herds, and abundant shade to the master, you would say, Tarentum in its beauty has been brought near to Rome! There is a fountain too, large enough to give a name to the river which it feeds; and the Ebro itself does not flow through Thrace with cooler or purer stream. Its waters also are good for the head and useful for digestion. This sweet, and, if you will believe me, charming retreat keeps me in good health during the autumnal days."

The remains of Horace's Villa are situated on a wooded hillside above the river at Licenza, which joins the Aniene as it flows on to Tivoli.

Horace reads his poems in front of Maecenas, by Fyodor Bronnikov

Horace reciting his verses, by Adalbert von Rössler.

The Epodes belong to iambic poetry. Iambic poetry features insulting and obscene language; sometimes, it is referred to as blame poetry. Blame poetry, or shame poetry, is poetry written to blame and shame fellow citizens into a sense of their social obligations. Each poem normally has a archetype person Horace decides to shame, or teach a lesson to. Horace modelled these poems on the poetry of Archilochus. Social bonds in Rome had been decaying since the destruction of Carthage a little more than a hundred years earlier, due to the vast wealth that could be gained by plunder and corruption. These social ills were magnified by rivalry between Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and confederates like Sextus Pompey, all jockeying for a bigger share of the spoils. One modern scholar has counted a dozen civil wars in the hundred years leading up to 31 BC, including the Spartacus rebellion, eight years before Horace's birth. As the heirs to Hellenistic culture, Horace and his fellow Romans were not well prepared to deal with these problems:

At bottom, all the problems that the times were stirring up were of a social nature, which the Hellenistic thinkers were ill qualified to grapple with. Some of them censured oppression of the poor by the rich, but they gave no practical lead, though they may have hoped to see well-meaning rulers doing so. Philosophy was drifting into absorption in self, a quest for private contentedness, to be achieved by self-control and restraint, without much regard for the fate of a disintegrating community.

Horace's Hellenistic background is clear in his Satires, even though the genre was unique to Latin literature. He brought to it a style and outlook suited to the social and ethical issues confronting Rome but he changed its role from public, social engagement to private meditation. Meanwhile, he was beginning to interest Octavian's supporters, a gradual process described by him in one of his satires. The way was opened for him by his friend, the poet Virgil, who had gained admission into the privileged circle around Maecenas, Octavian's lieutenant, following the success of his . An introduction soon followed and, after a discreet interval, Horace too was accepted. He depicted the process as an honourable one, based on merit and mutual respect, eventually leading to true friendship, and there is reason to believe that his relationship was genuinely friendly, not just with Maecenas but afterwards with Augustus as well. On the other hand, the poet has been unsympathetically described by one scholar as "a sharp and rising young man, with an eye to the main chance." There were advantages on both sides: Horace gained encouragement and material support, the politicians gained a hold on a potential dissident. His republican sympathies, and his role at Philippi, may have caused him some pangs of remorse over his new status. However, most Romans considered the civil wars to be the result of contentio dignitatis, or rivalry between the foremost families of the city, and he too seems to have accepted the principate as Rome's last hope for much needed peace.

In 37 BC, Horace accompanied Maecenas on a journey to Brundisium, described in one of his poems as a series of amusing incidents and charming encounters with other friends along the way, such as Virgil. In fact the journey was political in its motivation, with Maecenas en route to negotiate the Treaty of Tarentum with Antony, a fact Horace artfully keeps from the reader (political issues are largely avoided in the first book of satires). Horace was probably also with Maecenas on one of Octavian's naval expeditions against the piratical Sextus Pompeius, which ended in a disastrous storm off Palinurus in 36 BC, briefly alluded to by Horace in terms of near-drowning. There are also some indications in his verses that he was with Maecenas at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, where Octavian defeated his great rival, Antony. By then Horace had already received from Maecenas the famous gift of his Sabine farm, probably not long after the publication of the first book of Satires. The gift, which included income from five tenants, may have ended his career at the Treasury, or at least allowed him to give it less time and energy. It signalled his identification with the Octavian regime yet, in the second book of Satires that soon followed, he continued the apolitical stance of the first book. By this time, he had attained the status of eques Romanus (Roman 'cavalryman', 'knight'), perhaps as a result of his work at the Treasury.

Odes 1-3 were the next focus for his artistic creativity. He adapted their forms and themes from Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The fragmented nature of the Greek world had enabled his literary heroes to express themselves freely and his semi-retirement from the Treasury in Rome to his own estate in the Sabine hills perhaps empowered him to some extent also yet even when his lyrics touched on public affairs they reinforced the importance of private life. Nevertheless, his work in the period 30-27 BC began to show his closeness to the regime and his sensitivity to its developing ideology. In Odes 1.2, for example, he eulogized Octavian in hyperboles that echo Hellenistic court poetry. The name Augustus, which Octavian assumed in 27 January BC, is first attested in Odes 3.3 and 3.5. In the period 27-24 BC, political allusions in the Odes concentrated on foreign wars in Britain (1.35), Arabia (1.29) Hispania (3.8) and Parthia (2.2). He greeted Augustus on his return to Rome in 24 BC as a beloved ruler upon whose good health he depended for his own happiness (3.14).

The public reception of Odes 1-3 disappointed him, however. He attributed the lack of success to jealousy among imperial courtiers and to his isolation from literary cliques. Perhaps it was disappointment that led him to put aside the genre in favour of verse letters. He addressed his first book of Epistles to a variety of friends and acquaintances in an urbane style reflecting his new social status as a knight. In the opening poem, he professed a deeper interest in moral philosophy than poetry but, though the collection demonstrates a leaning towards stoic theory, it reveals no sustained thinking about ethics. Maecenas was still the dominant confidante but Horace had now begun to assert his own independence, suavely declining constant invitations to attend his patron. In the final poem of the first book of Epistles, he revealed himself to be forty-four years old in the consulship of Lollius and Lepidus i.e. 21 BC, and "of small stature, fond of the sun, prematurely grey, quick-tempered but easily placated".

According to Suetonius, the second book of Epistles was prompted by Augustus, who desired a verse epistle to be addressed to himself. Augustus was in fact a prolific letter-writer and he once asked Horace to be his personal secretary. Horace refused the secretarial role but complied with the emperor's request for a verse letter. The letter to Augustus may have been slow in coming, being published possibly as late as 11 BC. It celebrated, among other things, the 15 BC military victories of his stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, yet it and the following letter were largely devoted to literary theory and criticism. The literary theme was explored still further in Ars Poetica, published separately but written in the form of an epistle and sometimes referred to as Epistles 2.3 (possibly the last poem he ever wrote). He was also commissioned to write odes commemorating the victories of Drusus and Tiberius and one to be sung in a temple of Apollo for the Secular Games, a long-abandoned festival that Augustus revived in accordance with his policy of recreating ancient customs ( Carmen Saeculare).

Suetonius recorded some gossip about Horace's sexual activities late in life, claiming that the walls of his bedchamber were covered with obscene pictures and mirrors, so that he saw erotica wherever he looked. The poet died at 56 years of age, not long after his friend Maecenas, near whose tomb he was laid to rest. Both men bequeathed their property to Augustus, an honour that the emperor expected of his friends.

The dating of Horace's works isn't known precisely and scholars often debate the exact order in which they were first 'published'. There are persuasive arguments for the following chronology:

Horace composed in traditional metres borrowed from Archaic Greece, employing hexameters in his Satires and Epistles, and iambs in his Epodes, all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms. His Odes featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modelled in the work of Callimachus.

As soon as Horace, stirred by his own genius and encouraged by the example of Virgil, Varius, and perhaps some other poets of the same generation, had determined to make his fame as a poet, being by temperament a fighter, he wanted to fight against all kinds of prejudice, amateurish slovenliness, philistinism, reactionary tendencies, in short to fight for the new and noble type of poetry which he and his friends were endeavouring to bring about.

In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience ( Urerlebnis) and experience mediated by cultural vectors such as literature, philosophy and the visual arts ( Bildungserlebnis). The distinction has little relevance for Horace[citation needed ] however since his personal and literary experiences are implicated in each other. Satires 1.5, for example, recounts in detail a real trip Horace made with Virgil and some of his other literary friends, and which parallels a Satire by Lucilius, his predecessor. Unlike much Hellenistic-inspired literature, however, his poetry was not composed for a small coterie of admirers and fellow poets, nor does it rely on abstruse allusions for many of its effects. Though elitist in its literary standards, it was written for a wide audience, as a public form of art. Ambivalence also characterizes his literary persona, since his presentation of himself as part of a small community of philosophically aware people, seeking true peace of mind while shunning vices like greed, was well adapted to Augustus's plans to reform public morality, corrupted by greed-his personal plea for moderation was part of the emperor's grand message to the nation.

Horace generally followed the examples of poets established as classics in different genres, such as Archilochus in the Epodes, Lucilius in the Satires and Alcaeus in the Odes, later broadening his scope for the sake of variation and because his models weren't actually suited to the realities confronting him. Archilochus and Alcaeus were aristocratic Greeks whose poetry had a social and religious function that was immediately intelligible to their audiences but which became a mere artifice or literary motif when transposed to Rome. However, the artifice of the Odes is also integral to their success, since they could now accommodate a wide range of emotional effects, and the blend of Greek and Roman elements adds a sense of detachment and universality. Horace proudly claimed to introduce into Latin the spirit and iambic poetry of Archilochus but (unlike Archilochus) without persecuting anyone ( Epistles 1.19.23-25). It was no idle boast. His Epodes were modelled on the verses of the Greek poet, as 'blame poetry', yet he avoided targeting real scapegoats. Whereas Archilochus presented himself as a serious and vigorous opponent of wrong-doers, Horace aimed for comic effects and adopted the persona of a weak and ineffectual critic of his times (as symbolized for example in his surrender to the witch Canidia in the final epode). He also claimed to be the first to introduce into Latin the lyrical methods of Alcaeus ( Epistles 1.19.32-33) and he actually was the first Latin poet to make consistent use of Alcaic meters and themes: love, politics and the symposium. He imitated other Greek lyric poets as well, employing a 'motto' technique, beginning each ode with some reference to a Greek original and then diverging from it.

The satirical poet Lucilius was a senator's son who could castigate his peers with impunity. Horace was a mere freedman's son who had to tread carefully. Lucilius was a rugged patriot and a significant voice in Roman self-awareness, endearing himself to his countrymen by his blunt frankness and explicit politics. His work expressed genuine freedom or libertas. His style included 'metrical vandalism' and looseness of structure. Horace instead adopted an oblique and ironic style of satire, ridiculing stock characters and anonymous targets. His libertas was the private freedom of a philosophical outlook, not a political or social privilege. His Satires are relatively easy-going in their use of meter (relative to the tight lyric meters of the Odes) but formal and highly controlled relative to the poems of Lucilius, whom Horace mocked for his sloppy standards ( Satires 1.10.56-61)

The Epistles may be considered among Horace's most innovative works. There was nothing like it in Greek or Roman literature. Occasionally poems had had some resemblance to letters, including an elegiac poem from Solon to Mimnermus and some lyrical poems from Pindar to Hieron of Syracuse. Lucilius had composed a satire in the form of a letter, and some epistolary poems were composed by Catullus and Propertius. But nobody before Horace had ever composed an entire collection of verse letters, let alone letters with a focus on philosophical problems. The sophisticated and flexible style that he had developed in his Satires was adapted to the more serious needs of this new genre. Such refinement of style was not unusual for Horace. His craftsmanship as a wordsmith is apparent even in his earliest attempts at this or that kind of poetry, but his handling of each genre tended to improve over time as he adapted it to his own needs. Thus for example it is generally agreed that his second book of Satires, where human folly is revealed through dialogue between characters, is superior to the first, where he propounds his ethics in monologues. Nevertheless, the first book includes some of his most popular poems.

Horace developed a number of inter-related themes throughout his poetic career, including politics, love, philosophy and ethics, his own social role, as well as poetry itself. His Epodes and Satires are forms of 'blame poetry' and both have a natural affinity with the moralising and diatribes of Cynicism. This often takes the form of allusions to the work and philosophy of Bion of Borysthenes but it is as much a literary game as a philosophical alignment.

By the time he composed his Epistles, he was a critic of Cynicism along with all impractical and "high-falutin" philosophy in general.

The Satires also include a strong element of Epicureanism, with frequent allusions to the Epicurean poet Lucretius. So for example the Epicurean sentiment is the inspiration behind Horace's repeated punning on his own name ( Horatius ~ hora) in Satires 2.6. The Satires also feature some Stoic, Peripatetic and Platonic ( Dialogues) elements. In short, the Satires present a medley of philosophical programmes, dished up in no particular order-a style of argument typical of the genre.

The Odes display a wide range of topics. Over time, he becomes more confident about his political voice. Although he is often thought of as an overly intellectual lover, he is ingenious in representing passion. The "Odes" weave various philosophical strands together, with allusions and statements of doctrine present in about a third of the Odes Books 1-3, ranging from the flippant (1.22, 3.28) to the solemn (2.10, 3.2, 3.3). Epicureanism is the dominant influence, characterising about twice as many of these odes as Stoicism.

A group of odes combines these two influences in tense relationships, such as Odes 1.7, praising Stoic virility and devotion to public duty while also advocating private pleasures among friends. While generally favouring the Epicurean lifestyle, the lyric poet is as eclectic as the satiric poet, and in Odes 2.10 even proposes Aristotle's golden mean as a remedy for Rome's political troubles.

Many of Horace's poems also contain much reflection on genre, the lyric tradition, and the function of poetry. Odes 4, thought to be composed at the emperor's request, takes the themes of the first three books of "Odes" to a new level. This book shows greater poetic confidence after the public performance of his "Carmen saeculare" or "Century hymn" at a public festival orchestrated by Augustus. In it, Horace addresses the emperor Augustus directly with more confidence and proclaims his power to grant poetic immortality to those he praises. It is the least philosophical collection of his verses, excepting the twelfth ode, addressed to the dead Virgil as if he were living. In that ode, the epic poet and the lyric poet are aligned with Stoicism and Epicureanism respectively, in a mood of bitter-sweet pathos.

The first poem of the Epistles sets the philosophical tone for the rest of the collection: "So now I put aside both verses and all those other games: What is true and what befits is my care, this my question, this my whole concern." His poetic renunciation of poetry in favour of philosophy is intended to be ambiguous. Ambiguity is the hallmark of the Epistles. It is uncertain if those being addressed by the self-mocking poet-philosopher are being honoured or criticised. Though he emerges as an Epicurean, it is on the understanding that philosophical preferences, like political and social choices, are a matter of personal taste. Thus he depicts the ups and downs of the philosophical life more realistically than do most philosophers.

Horace, portrayed by Giacomo Di Chirico

The reception of Horace's work has varied from one epoch to another and varied markedly even in his own lifetime. Odes 1-3 were not well received when first 'published' in Rome, yet Augustus later commissioned a ceremonial ode for the Centennial Games in 17 BC and also encouraged the publication of Odes 4, after which Horace's reputation as Rome's premier lyricist was assured. His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: no other poet produced a comparable body of lyrics in the four centuries that followed (though that might also be attributed to social causes, particularly the parasitism that Italy was sinking into). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ode-writing became highly fashionable in England and a large number of aspiring poets imitated Horace both in English and in Latin.

In a verse epistle to Augustus (Epistle 2.1), in 12 BC, Horace argued for classic status to be awarded to contemporary poets, including Virgil and apparently himself. In the final poem of his third book of Odes he claimed to have created for himself a monument more durable than bronze ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius", 3.30.1). For one modern scholar, however, Horace's personal qualities are more notable than the monumental quality of his achievement:

... when we hear his name we don't really think of a monument. We think rather of a voice which varies in tone and resonance but is always recognizable, and which by its unsentimental humanity evokes a very special blend of liking and respect.

Yet for men like Wilfred Owen, scarred by experiences of World War I, his poetry stood for discredited values:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The same motto, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, had been adapted to the ethos of martyrdom in the lyrics of early Christian poets like Prudentius.

These preliminary comments touch on a small sample of developments in the reception of Horace's work. More developments are covered epoch by epoch in the following sections.

Horace's influence can be observed in the work of his near contemporaries, Ovid and Propertius. Ovid followed his example in creating a completely natural style of expression in hexameter verse, and Propertius cheekily mimicked him in his third book of elegies. His Epistles provided them both with a model for their own verse letters and it also shaped Ovid's exile poetry.

His influence had a perverse aspect. As mentioned before, the brilliance of his Odes may have discouraged imitation. Conversely, they may have created a vogue for the lyrics of the archaic Greek poet Pindar, due to the fact that Horace had neglected that style of lyric (see Influence and Legacy of Pindar). The iambic genre seems almost to have disappeared after publication of Horace's Epodes. Ovid's Ibis was a rare attempt at the form but it was inspired mainly by Callimachus, and there are some iambic elements in Martial but the main influence there was Catullus. A revival of popular interest in the satires of Lucilius may have been inspired by Horace's criticism of his unpolished style. Both Horace and Lucilius were considered good role-models by Persius, who critiqued his own satires as lacking both the acerbity of Lucillius and the gentler touch of Horace. Juvenal's caustic satire was influenced mainly by Lucilius but Horace by then was a school classic and Juvenal could refer to him respectfully and in a round-about way as " the Venusine lamp".

Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter (the verse forms most often associated with Odes), which he included in his collection of occasional poems, Silvae. Ancient scholars wrote commentaries on the lyric meters of the Odes, including the scholarly poet Caesius Bassus. By a process called derivatio, he varied established meters through the addition or omission of syllables, a technique borrowed by Seneca the Younger when adapting Horatian meters to the stage.

Horace's poems continued to be school texts into late antiquity. Works attributed to Helenius Acro and Pomponius Porphyrio are the remnants of a much larger body of Horatian scholarship. Porphyrio arranged the poems in non-chronological order, beginning with the Odes, because of their general popularity and their appeal to scholars (the Odes were to retain this privileged position in the medieval manuscript tradition and thus in modern editions also). Horace was often evoked by poets of the fourth century, such as Ausonius and Claudian. Prudentius presented himself as a Christian Horace, adapting Horatian meters to his own poetry and giving Horatian motifs a Christian tone. On the other hand, St Jerome, modelled an uncompromising response to the pagan Horace, observing: " What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? What has Horace to do with the Psalter?" By the early sixth century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to survive the disorder of the times. Boethius, the last major author of classical Latin literature, could still take inspiration from Horace, sometimes mediated by Senecan tragedy. It can be argued that Horace's influence extended beyond poetry to dignify core themes and values of the early Christian era, such as self-sufficiency, inner contentment and courage.

Horace in his Studium: German print of the fifteenth century, summarizing the final ode 4.15 (in praise of Augustus).

Classical texts almost ceased being copied in the period between the mid sixth century and the Carolingian revival. Horace's work probably survived in just two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy. These became the ancestors of six extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century. Two of those six manuscripts are French in origin, one was produced in Alsace, and the other three show Irish influence but were probably written in continental monasteries ( Lombardy for example). By the last half of the ninth century, it was not uncommon for literate people to have direct experience of Horace's poetry. His influence on the Carolingian Renaissance can be found in the poems of Heiric of Auxerre and in some manuscripts marked with neumes, mysterious notations that may have been an aid to the memorization and discussion of his lyric meters. Ode 4.11 is neumed with the melody of a hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, composed in Sapphic stanzas. This hymn later became the basis of the solfege system ( Do, re, mi...)-an association with western music quite appropriate for a lyric poet like Horace, though the language of the hymn is mainly Prudentian. Lyons argues that the melody in question was linked with Horace's Ode well before Guido d'Arezzo fitted Ut queant laxis to it. However, the melody is unlikely to be a survivor from classical times, although Ovid testifies to Horace's use of the lyre while performing his Odes.

The German scholar, Ludwig Traube, once dubbed the tenth and eleventh centuries The age of Horace ( aetas Horatiana), and placed it between the aetas Vergiliana of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a distinction supposed to reflect the dominant classical Latin influences of those times. Such a distinction is over-schematized since Horace was a substantial influence in the ninth century as well. Traube had focused too much on Horace's Satires. Almost all of Horace's work found favour in the Medieval period. In fact medieval scholars were also guilty of over-schematism, associating Horace's different genres with the different ages of man. A twelfth-century scholar encapsulated the theory: "...Horace wrote four different kinds of poems on account of the four ages, the Odes for boys, the Ars Poetica for young men, the Satires for mature men, the Epistles for old and complete men." It was even thought that Horace had composed his works in the order in which they had been placed by ancient scholars. Despite its naivety, the schematism involved an appreciation of Horace's works as a collection, the Ars Poetica, Satires and Epistles appearing to find favour as well as the Odes. The later Middle Ages however gave special significance to Satires and Epistles, being considered Horace's mature works. Dante referred to Horace as Orazio satiro, and he awarded him a privileged position in the first circle of Hell, with Homer, Ovid and Lucan.

Horace's popularity is revealed in the large number of quotes from all his works found in almost every genre of medieval literature, and also in the number of poets imitating him in quantitative Latin meter. The most prolific imitator of his Odes was the Bavarian monk, Metellus of Tegernsee, who dedicated his work to the patron saint of Tegernsee Abbey, St Quirinus, around the year 1170. He imitated all Horace's lyrical meters then followed these up with imitations of other meters used by Prudentius and Boethius, indicating that variety, as first modelled by Horace, was considered a fundamental aspect of the lyric genre. The content of his poems however was restricted to simple piety. Among the most successful imitators of Satires and Epistles was another Germanic author, calling himself Sextus Amarcius, around 1100, who composed four books, the first two exemplifying vices, the second pair mainly virtues.

Petrarch is a key figure in the imitation of Horace in accentual meters. His verse letters in Latin were modelled on the Epistles and he wrote a letter to Horace in the form of an ode. However he also borrowed from Horace when composing his Italian sonnets. One modern scholar has speculated that authors who imitated Horace in accentual rhythms (including stressed Latin and vernacular languages) may have considered their work a natural sequel to Horace's metrical variety. In France, Horace and Pindar were the poetic models for a group of vernacular authors called the Pléiade, including for example Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes. The vernacular languages were dominant in Castilia and Portugal in the sixteenth century, where Horace's influence is notable in the works of such authors as Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, Sá de Miranda, Antonio Ferreira and Fray Luis de León, the last writing odes on the Horatian theme beatus ille ( happy the man). The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations (except in Germany, where Horace wasn't translated into the vernacular until well into the seventeenth century). The first English translator was Thomas Drant, who placed translations of Jeremiah and Horace side by side in Medicinable Morall, 1566. That was also the year that the Scot George Buchanan paraphrased the Psalms in a Horatian setting. Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 in , along with other classical Latin authors, giving them all their own verses to speak in translation. Horace's part evinces the independent spirit, moral earnestness and critical insight that many readers look for in his poems.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Age of Enlightenment, neoclassical culture was pervasive. English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed Augustan. It is not always easy to distinguish Horace's influence during those centuries (the mixing of influences is shown for example in one poet's pseudonym, Horace Juvenal). However a measure of his influence can be found in the diversity of the people interested in his works, both among readers and authors.

New editions of his works were published almost yearly. There were three new editions in 1612 (two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt) and again in 1699 ( Utrecht, Barcelona, Cambridge). Cheap editions were plentiful and fine editions were also produced, including one whose entire text was engraved by John Pine in copperplate. The poet James Thomson owned five editions of Horace's work and the physician James Douglas had five hundred books with Horace-related titles. Horace was often commended in periodicals such as The Spectator, as a hallmark of good judgement, moderation and manliness, a focus for moralising. His verses offered a fund of mottoes, such as simplex munditiis (elegance in simplicity), splendide mendax (nobly untruthful), sapere aude (dare to know), nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink), (seize the day, perhaps the only one still in common use today). These were quoted even in works as prosaic as Edmund Quincy's A treatise of hemp-husbandry (1765). The fictional hero Tom Jones recited his verses with feeling. His works were also used to justify commonplace themes, such as patriotic obedience, as in James Parry's English lines from an Oxford University collection in 1736:

What friendly Muse will teach my Lays
To emulate the Roman fire?
Justly to sound a Caesar's praise
Demands a bold Horatian lyre.

Horatian-style lyrics were increasingly typical of Oxford and Cambridge verse collections for this period, most of them in Latin but some like the previous ode in English. John Milton's Lycidas first appeared in such a collection. It has few Horatian echoes yet Milton's associations with Horace were lifelong. He composed a controversial version of Odes 1.5, and Paradise Lost includes references to Horace's 'Roman' Odes 3.1-6 (Book 7 for example begins with echoes of Odes 3.4). Yet Horace's lyrics could offer inspiration to libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. Thus for example Benjamin Loveling authored a catalogue of Drury Lane and Covent Garden prostitutes, in Sapphic stanzas, and an encomium for a dying lady "of salacious memory". Some Latin imitations of Horace were politically subversive, such as a marriage ode by Anthony Alsop that included a rallying cry for the Jacobite cause. On the other hand, Andrew Marvell took inspiration from Horace's Odes 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of Charles I echo Horace's ambiguous response to the death of Cleopatra (Marvell's ode was suppressed in spite of its subtlety and only began to be widely published in 1776). Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes. Alexander Pope wrote direct Imitations of Horace (published with the original Latin alongside) and also echoed him in Essays and The Rape of the Lock. He even emerged as "a quite Horatian Homer" in his translation of the . Horace appealed also to female poets, such as Anna Seward ( Original sonnets on various subjects, and odes paraphrased from Horace, 1799) and Elizabeth Tollet, who composed a Latin ode in Sapphic meter to celebrate her brother's return from overseas, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of Horace's sympotic settings:

Quos procax nobis numeros, jocosque
Musa dictaret? mihi dum tibique
Temperent baccis Arabes, vel herbis
Pocula Seres

What verses and jokes might the bold
Muse dictate? while for you and me
Arabs flavour our cups with beans
Or Chinese with leaves.

Horace in an anonymous late 18th to early 19th century engraving

Horace's Ars Poetica is second only to Aristotle's Poetics in its influence on literary theory and criticism. Milton recommended both works in his treatise of Education. Horace's Satires and Epistles however also had a huge impact, influencing theorists and critics such as John Dryden. There was considerable debate over the value of different lyrical forms for contemporary poets, as represented on one hand by the kind of four-line stanzas made familiar by Horace's Sapphic and Alcaic Odes and, on the other, the loosely structured Pindarics associated with the odes of Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus Christopher Smart entirely omitted Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes. He also removed the ending of Odes 4.1. Thomas Creech printed Epodes 8 and 12 in the original Latin but left out their English translations. Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those same two epodes, a gap in the numbering the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly bowdlerized.

Most European nations had their own 'Horaces': thus for example Friedrich von Hagedorn was called The German Horace and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace (the latter was much imitated by English poets such as Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley). Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout.

Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s. A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters yet it also confirmed his influence-a tension in his reception that underlies Byron's famous lines from Childe Harold (Canto iv, 77):

Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so
Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse.

William Wordsworth's mature poetry, including the preface to Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace's influence in its rejection of false ornament and he once expressed "a wish / to meet the shade of Horace...". John Keats echoed the opening of Horace's Epodes 14 in the opening lines of Ode to a Nightingale.

The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackeray produced a version of Odes 1.38 in which Horace's 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1.25 and Epodes 8 and 12. Edward Bulwer-Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian , nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one modern scholar has observed, "...the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the 'Odes', as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing Epicurean Omar himself, mixing sympotic exhortation and 'carpe diem' with splendid moralising and 'memento mori' nihilism." Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes 2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace's inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of Victorian virtues, observing: " If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace...would be the perfect interpreter of human life." Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace's depiction of 'Glycera' in Odes 1.19.5-6 and Cleopatra in Odes 1.37. A. E. Housman considered Odes 4.7, in Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity and yet he generally shared Horace's penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain. The most famous poem of Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine's name from a line of Odes 4.1, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame. Kipling wrote a famous parody of the Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncrasies and especially the extraordinary syntax, but he also used Horace's Roman patriotism as a focus for British imperialism, as in the story Regulus in the school collection , which he based on Odes 3.5. Wilfred Owen's famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin scansion. However, there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace's work. The Spanish poet Miquel Costa i Llobera published his renowned collection of poems named Horacianes, thus being dedicated to the Latin poet Horace, and employing Sapphics, Alcaics and similar types of stanzas.

Bibendum (the symbol of the Michelin tyre company) takes his name from the opening line of Ode 1.37, Nunc est bibendum.

Both W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace's influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing Odes 2.11.1-4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures.

And, gentle, do not care to know
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done;
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.

Odes 1.14 - Wall poem in Leiden

The American poet Robert Frost echoed Horace's Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace's fons Bandusiae in Ode 3.13. Now at the start of the third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation (such as a 2002 English/American edition of the Odes by thirty-six poets) and sometimes as inspiration for their own work (such as a 2003 collection of odes by a New Zealand poet).

Horace's Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the whole collection. A re-appraisal of the Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets (such as a 2004 collection of poems that relocates the ancient context to a 1950s industrial town).

The Ars Poetica was first translated into English by Thomas Drant in 1556, and later by Ben Jonson and Lord Byron.

John Dryden, Sylvæ; or, The second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London: Jacob Tonson, 1685) with adaptations of three of the Odes, and one Epode.

Philip Francis, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace (Dublin, 1742; London, 1743)

--- The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (1746) Samuel Johnson favoured these translations.

C. S. Calverley, Verses and Translations (1860; rev. 1862) Included versions of ten of the Odes.

John Conington, The Odes and Carmen Sæculare of Horace (1863; rev. 1872)

--- The Satires, Epistles and Ars Poëtica of Horace (1869)

Theodore Martin, The Odes of Horace, Translated Into English Verse, with a Life and Notes (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866)

Edward Marsh, The Odes of Horace. Translated into English Verse by Edward Marsh (London: Macmillan & Co., 1941).

James Michie, The Odes of Horace (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964) Included a dozen Odes in the original Sapphic and Alcaic metres.

More recent verse translations of the Odes include those by David West (free verse), and Colin Sydenham (rhymed).

In 1983, Charles E. Passage translated all the works of Horace in the original metres.

Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi Stuart Lyons (rhymed) Aris & Phillips ISBN 978-0-85668-790-7

The Oxford Latin Course textbooks use the life of Horace to illustrate an average Roman's life in the late Republic to Early Empire. Horace was portrayed by Norman Shelley in the 1976 miniseries .

1. Quintilian 10.1.96. The only other lyrical poet Quintilian thought comparable with Horace was the now obscure poet/metrical theorist, ^ Caesius Bassus (R. Tarrant, Ancient Receptions of Horace, 280)

2. Quoted by ^ N. Rudd from John Dryden's Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, excerpted from W.P.Ker's edition of Dryden's essays, Oxford 1926, vol. 2, pp. 86-87

3. The year is given in ^ Odes 3.21.1 ("Consule Manlio"), the month in Epistles 1.20.27, the day in Suetonius' biography Vita (R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 7)

4. ^ Odes 3.4.28: "nec (me extinxit) Sicula Palinurus unda"; "nor did Palinurus extinguish me with Sicilian waters". Maecenas' involvement is recorded by Appian Bell. Civ. 5.99 but Horace's ode is the only historical reference to his own presence there, depending however on interpretation. (R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 10)

5. "[Lucilius]...resembles a man whose only concern is to force / something into the framework of six feet, and who gaily produces / two hundred lines before dinner and another two hundred after." - ^ Satire 1.10.59-61 (translated by Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace and Persius, Penguin Classics 1973, p. 69)

6. ^ Epistles 1.17 and 1.18.6-8 are critical of the extreme views of Diogenes and also of social adaptations of Cynic precepts, and yet Epistle 1.2 could be either Cynic or Stoic in its orientation (J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 177

7. Wilfred Owen, ^ Dulce et decorum est (1917), echoes a line from Carmina 3.2.13, "it is sweet and honourable to die for one's country", cited by Stephen Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 340.

8. Ovid for example probably borrowed from Horace's ^ Epistle 1.20 the image of a poetry book as a slave boy eager to leave home, adapting it to the opening poems of Tristia 1 and 3 (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace), and Tristia 2 May be understood as a counterpart to Horace's Epistles 2.1, both being letters addressed to Augustus on literary themes (A. Barchiesi, Speaking Volumes, 79-103)

9. The allusion to ^ Venusine comes via Horace's Sermones 2.1.35, while lamp signifies the lucubrations of a conscientious poet. According to Quintilian (93), however, many people in Flavian Rome preferred Lucilius not only to Horace but to all other Latin poets (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 279)

10. Prudentius sometimes alludesto the ^ Odes in a negative context, as expressions of a secular life he is abandoning. Thus for example male pertinax, employed in Prudentius's Praefatio to describe a willful desire for victory, is lifted from Odes 1.9.24, where it describes a girl's half-hearted resistance to seduction. Elsewhere he borrows dux bone from Odes 4.5.5 and 37, where it refers to Augustus, and applies it to Christ (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 282

11. St Jerome, ^ Epistles 22.29, incorporating a quote from 2 Corinthians 6.14: qui consensus Christo et Belial? quid facit cum psalterio Horatius? (cited by K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 292)

12. ^ Odes 3.3.1-8 was especially influential in promoting the value of heroic calm in the face of danger, describing a man who could bear even the collapse of the world without fear (si fractus illabatur orbis,/impavidum ferient ruinae). Echoes are found in Seneca's Agamemnon 593-603, Prudentius's Peristephanon 4.5-12 and Boethius's Consolatio 1 metrum 4.(R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 283-85)

13. According to a medieval French commentary on the ^ Satires: "...first he composed his lyrics, and in them, speaking to the young, as it were, he took as subject-matter love affairs and quarrels, banquets and drinking parties. Next he wrote his Epodes, and in them composed invectives against men of a more advanced and more dishonourable age...He next wrote his book about the Ars Poetica, and in that instructed men of his own profession to write well...Later he added his book of Satires, in which he reproved those who had fallen a prey to various kinds of vices. Finally, he finished his oeuvre with the Epistles, and in them, following the method of a good farmer, he sowed the virtues where he had rooted out the vices." (cited by K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 294-302)

14. Cfr. ^ James Boswell, "The Life of Samuel Johnson" Aetat. 20, 1729 where Boswell remarked of Johnson that Horace's Odes "were the compositions in which he took most delight."

15. "^ My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense..." echoes Epodes 14.1-4 (S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 335)

16. 'Political' Epodes are 1, 7, 9, 16; notably obscene Epodes are 8 and 12. E. Fraenkel is among the admirers repulsed by these two poems, for another view of which see for example Dee Lesser Clayman, 'Horace's Epodes VIII and XII: More than Clever Obscenity?', ^ The Classical World Vol. 6, No. 1 (September 1975), pp 55-61 JSTOR 4348329

Works by Horace at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about Horace at Internet Archive

Works by Horace at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Q. Horati Flacci opera, recensuerunt O. Keller et A. Holder, 2 voll., Lipsiae in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1864-9.

Q. Horati Flacci opera (critical edition of all Horace's poems), edited by O. Keller & A. Holder, published by B. G. Teubner, 1878.

Common sayings from Horace

The works of Horace at The Latin Library

Carmina Horatiana All Carmina of Horace in Latin recited by Thomas Bervoets.

Selected Poems of Horace

Works by Horace at Perseus Digital Library

Willett, Steven (1998). "A Biography of Horace and an Annotated Bibliography". Diotíma: Selections from Horace's Odes.

Horace's works: text, concordances and frequency list

SORGLL: Horace, Odes I.22, read by Robert Sonkowsky

Translations of several odes in the original meters (with accompaniment).

A discussion and comparison of three different contemporary translations of Horace's Odes

academia.edu: Tossing Augustus out of Horace's Ars Poetica

Horati opera, Acronis et Porphyrionis commentarii, varia lectio etc. (latine)

Horace MS 1a Ars Poetica and Epistulae at OPenn

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Quintus Horatius Flaccus ( Classical Latin: [ˈkʷiːntʊs(h)ɔˈraːtiʊsˈfɫakːʊs]; 8 December 65 BC - 27 November 8 BC[citation needed ]), commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian).

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is the second-person singular present active imperative of "pick or pluck" used by Horace to mean "enjoy, seize, use, make use of". Diem is the accusative of "day". A more literal translation of would thus be "pluck the day [as it is ripe]"-that is, enjoy the moment.

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Multi-finish range (2016)&brand=Resene&name=Carpe Diem

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HEX #E4943D color name is Carpe Diem.

HEX color code #E4943D represent the color in hexadecimal format by combining three values - the amounts of Red, Green and Blue (RGB).

The RGB values of this color are 228, 148, 61 ( rgb(228, 148, 61) ). That means #E4943D color is composed of 89.4% of Red, 58% Green and 23.9% Blue.

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Carpe Diem (#E4943D) Color Page. Variations: Shades, Tints, Hues, Tones and Harmonies. HEX, RGB, CMYK Conversions. #E4943D Color images.

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bonum noctis = good night

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Golden Hexagon Mirrors

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The James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST or "Webb") is a space telescope that will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST will provide greatly improved resolution and sensitivity over the Hubble, and will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology.

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discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1204581231803768874

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39.958030, -75.604170

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#0000ff, #ff0000

https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1204582923882209320

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1204576793215107122

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February 6th 2024

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Unicode: U+003F

Hexadecimal: 0x3f

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www.reachthefinals.com/t3-f

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1178845133865750548

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Albertus Magnus, O.P. (c. 1200 - November 15, 1280), also known as Saint Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar and Catholic bishop. Later canonised as a Catholic saint, he was known during his lifetime as doctor universalis and doctor expertus and, late in his life, the term magnus was appended to his name.

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Coined the term "Big Bang"

Advocate for Jocelyn Bell Burnell to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Snubbed of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on the creation of all elements.

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Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 - 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential . He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters-in particular his rejection of the " Big Bang" theory (a term coined by him on BBC Radio) in favor of the " steady-state model", and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for six years.

Hoyle also wrote science fiction novels, short stories and radio plays, co-created television serials, and co-authored twelve books with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.

Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. His father, Ben Hoyle, who was a violinist and worked in the wool trade in Bradford, served as a machine gunner in the First World War. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and later worked as a cinema pianist. Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In his youth, he sang in the choir at the local Anglican church.

In 1936, he won the Mayhew Prize (jointly with George Stanley Rushbrooke).

In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method to get the altitude of the incoming aeroplanes. He was also put in charge of countermeasures against the radar guided guns found on the Graf Spee after its scuttling in the River Plate. Britain's radar project employed more personnel than the Manhattan project, and was probably the inspiration for the large British project in Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud. Two colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many and deep discussions on cosmology. The radar work paid for a couple of trips to North America, where he took the opportunity to visit astronomers. On one trip to the US, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium implosion and explosion, noticed some similarity between the two and started thinking about supernova nucleosynthesis. He had an intuition at the time "I will make a name for myself if this works out." Eventually (1954) his prescient and ground breaking paper came out. He also formed a group at Cambridge exploring stellar nucleosynthesis in ordinary stars and was bothered by the paucity of stellar carbon production in existing models. He noticed that one of the existing processes would be made a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance at 7.7 MeV, but the nuclear physicists did not list such a one. On another trip, he visited the nuclear physics group at Caltech, spending a few months of sabbatical there and persuaded them against their considerable scepticism to look for and find the Hoyle state in carbon-12, from which developed a full theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, co-authored by Hoyle with some members of the Caltech group.

A blue plaque at Bingley Grammar School commemorating him

After the war, in 1945, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University, as a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge. Hoyle's Cambridge years, 1945-1973, saw him rise to the top of world astrophysics theory, on the basis of a startling originality of ideas covering a very wide range of topics. In 1958, Hoyle was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in Cambridge University. In 1967, he became the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (subsequently renamed the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge), where his innovative leadership quickly led to this institution becoming one of the premier groups in the world for theoretical astrophysics. In 1971, he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "Astronomical Instruments and their Construction". Hoyle was knighted in 1972. Hoyle resigned his Plumian professor position in 1972 and his directorship of the institute in 1973, with this move effectively cutting him off from most of his establishment power-base, connections and steady salary.

After leaving Cambridge, Hoyle wrote many popular science and science fiction books, as well as presenting lectures around the world. Part of the motivation for this was simply to provide a means of support. Hoyle was still a member of the joint policy committee (since 1967), during the planning stage for the 150-inch Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. He became chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope board in 1973, and presided at its inauguration in 1974 by Charles, Prince of Wales.

After his resignation from Cambridge, Hoyle moved to the Lake District and occupied his time with a mix of treks across the moors, writing books, visiting research centres around the world, and working on science ideas that have been nearly universally rejected. On 24 November 1997, while hiking across moorlands in west Yorkshire, near his childhood home in Gilstead, Hoyle fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen. Roughly twelve hours later, Hoyle was found by a search dog. He was hospitalised for two months with pneumonia and kidney problems (both resulting from hypothermia), as well as a broken shoulder from the fall. Thereafter he entered a marked decline, suffering from memory and mental agility problems. In 2001, he suffered a series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on 20 August of that year.

Hoyle authored the first two research papers ever published on the synthesis of the chemical elements heavier than helium by nuclear reactions in stars. The first of these in 1946 showed that the cores of stars will evolve to temperatures of billions of degrees, much hotter than temperatures considered for thermonuclear origin of stellar power in main-sequence stars. Hoyle showed that at such high temperatures the element iron can become much more abundant than other heavy elements owing to thermal equilibrium among nuclear particles, explaining the high natural abundance of iron. This idea would later be called the eProcess. Hoyle's second foundational nucleosynthesis publication, published in 1954, showed that the elements between carbon and iron cannot be synthesized by such equilibrium processes. He attributed those elements to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova stars. This startlingly modern picture is the accepted paradigm today for the supernova nucleosynthesis of these primary elements. In the mid-1950s, Hoyle became the leader of a group of very talented experimental and theoretical physicists who met in Cambridge: William Alfred Fowler, Margaret Burbidge, and Geoffrey Burbidge. This group systematized basic ideas of how all the chemical elements in our universe were created, with this now being a field called nucleosynthesis. Famously, in 1957, this group produced the (known for the initials of the four authors) in which the field of nucleosynthesis was organized into complementary nuclear processes. They also added much new material on the synthesis of heavy elements by neutron-capture reactions, the so-called s process and the r process. So influential did the B ²FH paper become that for the remainder of the twentieth century it became the default citation of almost all researchers wishing to cite an accepted origin for nucleosynthesis theory, and as a result, the path-breaking Hoyle 1954 paper fell into obscurity. Historical research in the 21st century has brought Hoyle's 1954 paper back to scientific prominence. Those historical arguments were first presented to a gathering of nucleosynthesis experts attending a 2007 conference at Caltech organized after the deaths of both Fowler and Hoyle to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of B ²FH. Ironically the B ²FH paper did not review Hoyle's 1954 supernova-shells attribution of the origin of elements between silicon and iron despite Hoyle's co-authorship of B ²FH. Based on his many personal discussions with Hoyle Donald D. Clayton has attributed this seemingly inexplicable oversight in B ² FH to the lack of proofreading by Hoyle of the draft composed at Caltech in 1956 by G.R. Burbidge and E.M. Burbidge.

The second of Hoyle's nucleosynthesis papers also introduced an interesting use of the anthropic principle, which was not then known by that name. In trying to work out the routes of stellar nucleosynthesis, Hoyle calculated that one particular nuclear reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generates carbon from helium, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific resonance energy and spin for it to work. The large amount of carbon in the universe, which makes it possible for carbon-based life-forms of any kind to exist, demonstrated to Hoyle that this nuclear reaction must work. Based on this notion, Hoyle therefore predicted the values of the energy, the nuclear spin and the parity of the compound state in the carbon nucleus formed by three alpha particles (helium nuclei), which was later borne out by experiment.

This energy level, while needed to produce carbon in large quantities, was statistically very unlikely to fall where it does in the scheme of carbon energy levels. Hoyle later wrote:

Would you not say to yourself, "Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

His co-worker William Alfred Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 (with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar), but Hoyle's original contribution was overlooked by the electors, and many were surprised that such a notable astronomer missed out. Fowler himself in an autobiographical sketch affirmed Hoyle's pioneering efforts:

The concept of nucleosynthesis in stars was first established by Hoyle in 1946. This provided a way to explain the existence of elements heavier than helium in the universe, basically by showing that critical elements such as carbon could be generated in stars and then incorporated in other stars and planets when that star " dies". The new stars formed now start off with these heavier elements and even heavier elements are formed from them. Hoyle theorized that other rarer elements could be explained by supernovas, the giant explosions which occasionally occur throughout the universe, whose temperatures and pressures would be required to create such elements.

While having no argument with the Lemaître theory (later confirmed by Edwin Hubble's observations) that the universe was expanding, Hoyle disagreed on its interpretation. He found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be pseudoscience, resembling arguments for a creator, "for it's an irrational process, and can't be described in scientific terms" (see Kalam cosmological argument). Instead, Hoyle, along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi (with whom he had worked on radar in the Second World War), in 1948 began to argue for the universe as being in a "steady state" and formulated their Steady State theory. The theory tried to explain how the universe could be eternal and essentially unchanging while still having the galaxies we observe moving away from each other. The theory hinged on the creation of matter between galaxies over time, so that even though galaxies get further apart, new ones that develop between them fill the space they leave. The resulting universe is in a "steady state" in the same manner that a flowing river is-the individual water molecules are moving away but the overall river remains the same.

The theory was one alternative to the Big Bang which, like the Big Bang, agreed with key observations of the day, namely Hubble's red shift observations, and Hoyle was a strong critic of the Big Bang. He coined the term "Big Bang" on BBC radio's Third Programme broadcast on 28 March 1949. It was said by George Gamow and his opponents that Hoyle intended to be pejorative, and the script from which he read aloud was interpreted by his opponents to be "vain, one-sided, insulting, not worthy of the BBC". Hoyle explicitly denied that he was being insulting and said it was just a striking image meant to emphasize the difference between the two theories for the radio audience. In another BBC interview, he said, "The reason why scientists like the "big bang" is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis".

Hoyle had a famously heated argument with Martin Ryle of the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group about Hoyle's steady state theory, which somewhat restricted collaboration between the Cavendish group and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s.

Hoyle, unlike Gold and Bondi, offered an explanation for the appearance of new matter by postulating the existence of what he dubbed the "creation field", or just the "C-field", which had negative pressure in order to be consistent with the conservation of energy and drive the expansion of the universe. This C-field is the same as the later "de Sitter solution" for cosmic inflation, but the C-field model acts much slower than the de Sitter inflation model. They jointly argued that continuous creation was no more inexplicable than the appearance of the entire universe from nothing, although it had to be done on a regular basis. In the end, mounting observational evidence convinced most cosmologists that the steady state model was incorrect and that the Big Bang was the theory that agreed better with observations, although Hoyle continued to support and develop his theory. In 1993, in an attempt to explain some of the evidence against the steady state theory, he presented a modified version called " quasi-steady state cosmology" (QSS), but the theory is not widely accepted.

The evidence that resulted in the Big Bang's victory over the steady state model included the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1960s, and the distribution of "young galaxies" and quasars throughout the Universe in the 1980s indicate a more consistent age estimate of the universe. Hoyle died in 2001 having never accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory.

"How, in the big-bang cosmology, is the microwave background explained? Despite what supporters of big-bang cosmology claim, it is not explained. The supposed explanation is nothing but an entry in the gardener's catalogue of hypothesis that constitutes the theory. Had observation given 27 Kelvins instead of 2.7 Kelvins for the temperature, then 27 kelvins would have been entered in the catalogue. Or 0.27 Kelvins. Or anything at all."

Together with Narlikar, Hoyle developed a particle theory in the 1960s, the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity. It made predictions that were roughly the same as Einstein's general relativity, but it incorporated Mach's Principle, which Einstein had tried but failed to incorporate in his theory. The Hoyle-Narlikar theory fails several tests, including consistency with the microwave background. It was motivated by their belief in the steady state model of the universe.

In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of theories of abiogenesis to explain the origin of life on Earth. With Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the hypothesis that the first life on Earth began in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia, and that evolution on Earth is influenced by a steady influx of viruses arriving via comets. His belief that comets had a significant percentage of organic compounds was well ahead of his time, as the dominant views in the 1970s and 1980s were that comets largely consisted of water-ice, and the presence of organic compounds was then highly controversial. Wickramasinghe wrote in 2003: "In the highly polarized polemic between Darwinism and creationism, our position is unique. Although we do not align ourselves with either side, both sides treat us as opponents. Thus we are outsiders with an unusual perspective-and our suggestion for a way out of the crisis has not yet been considered."

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe advanced several instances where they say outbreaks of illnesses on Earth are of extraterrestrial origins, including the 1918 flu pandemic, and certain outbreaks of polio and mad cow disease. For the 1918 flu pandemic, they hypothesized that cometary dust brought the virus to Earth simultaneously at multiple locations-a view almost universally dismissed by experts on this pandemic. In 1982, Hoyle presented Evolution from Space for the Royal Institution's Omni Lecture. After considering what he thought of as a very remote possibility of Earth-based abiogenesis he concluded:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of...

Published in his 1982/1984 books Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell without panspermia was one in 10 40,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10 ⁸⁰), he argued that Earth as life's place of origin could be ruled out. He claimed:

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Though Hoyle declared himself an atheist, this apparent suggestion of a guiding hand led him to the conclusion that "a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and ... there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." He would go on to compare the random emergence of even the simplest cell without panspermia to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein" and to compare the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. This is known as "the junkyard tornado", or "Hoyle's Fallacy". Those who advocate the intelligent design (ID) philosophy sometimes cite Hoyle's work in this area to support the claim that the universe was fine tuned in order to allow intelligent life to be possible.

While Hoyle was well-regarded for his works on nucleosynthesis and science popularization, he held positions on a wide range of scientific issues that were in direct opposition to the prevailing theories of the scientific community. Paul Davies describes how he "loved his maverick personality and contempt for orthodoxy", quoting Hoyle as saying "I don't care what they think" about his theories on discrepant redshift, and "it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right".

Hoyle often expressed anger against the labyrinthine and petty politics at Cambridge and frequently feuded with members and institutions of all levels of the British astronomy community, leading to his resignation from Cambridge in September 1971 over the way he thought Donald Lynden-Bell was chosen to replace retiring professor Roderick Oliver Redman behind his back. According to biographer Simon Mitton, Hoyle was crestfallen because he felt that his colleagues at Cambridge were unsupportive.

In addition to his views on steady state theory and panspermia, Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations:

The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.

The theory of abiogenic petroleum, held by Hoyle and by Thomas Gold, where natural hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) are explained as the result of deep carbon deposits, instead of fossilized organic material. This theory is dismissed by the mainstream petroleum geochemistry community.

In his 1977 book On Stonehenge, Hoyle supported Gerald Hawkins's proposal that the fifty-six Aubrey holes at Stonehenge were used as a system for neolithic Britons to predict eclipses, using them in the daily positioning of marker stones. The use of the Aubrey holes for predicting lunar eclipses was originally proposed by Gerald Hawkins in his book of the subject Stonehenge Decoded (1965).

Hoyle was also at the centre of two unrelated controversies involving the politics for selecting the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics. The first came when the 1974 prize went, in part, to Antony Hewish for his leading role in the discovery of pulsars. Promptly Hoyle made an off-the-cuff remark to a reporter in Montreal that "Yes, Jocelyn Bell was the actual discoverer, not Hewish, who was her supervisor, so she should have been included." This remark received widespread international coverage. Worried about being misunderstood, Hoyle carefully composed a letter of explanation to .

The 1983 prize went in part to William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe." despite Hoyle having been the inventor of the theory of nucleosynthesis in the stars with two research papers published shortly after WWII. So some suspicion arose that Hoyle was denied the third share of this prize because of his earlier public disagreement with the 1974 award. British scientist Harry Kroto later said that the Nobel Prize is not just an award for a piece of work, but a recognition of a scientist's overall reputation and Hoyle's championing many disreputable and disproven ideas may have invalidated him. In , editor John Maddox called it "shameful" that Fowler had been rewarded with a Nobel prize and Hoyle had not.

Hoyle appeared in a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC in the 1950s; these were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe, and he went on to write a number of other popular science books.

In the play Sur la route de Montalcino, the character of Fred Hoyle confronts Georges Lemaître on a fictional journey to the Vatican in 1957.

Hoyle also appeared in the 1973 short film Take the World From Another Point of View.

In the 2004 television movie , Fred Hoyle is played by Peter Firth. In the movie, Stephen Hawking (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) publicly confronts Hoyle at a Royal Society lecture in summer 1964, about a mistake he found in his latest publication.

A statue of Fred Hoyle at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

Awards

Named after him

The Fred Hoyle Collection at St John's College Library contains "a pair of walking boots, five boxes of photographs, two ice axes, some dental X-rays, a telescope, ten large film reels and an unpublished opera" in addition to 150 document boxes of papers.

The Nature of the Universe - a series of broadcast lectures, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1950 (early use of the big bang phrase)

Frontiers of Astronomy, Heinemann Education Books Limited, London, 1955. The Internet Archive. HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0060027605

Burbidge, E.M., Burbidge, G.R., Fowler, W.A. and Hoyle, F., "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" Archived 24 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Revs. Mod. Physics 29:547-650, 1957, the famous B²FH paper after their initials, for which Hoyle is most famous among professional cosmologists.

Nicolaus Copernicus, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, p. 78, 1973

Ten Faces of the Universe, 1977, W.H. Freeman and Company (San Francisco), ISBN 071670384X, 0716703831

On Stonehenge, 1977, London : Heinemann Educational, ISBN 978-0435329587; San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, ISBN 0716703645, 0716703637 pbk.

Diseases from Space (with Chandra Wickramasinghe) (J.M. Dent, London, 1979)[63]

The big bang in astronomy, New Scientist 92(1280):527, 19 November 1981.

Ice, the Ultimate Human Catastrophe,1981, ISBN 0826400647 [64] Snippet view from Google Books

The Intelligent Universe, 1983

With Jayant Narlikar and Chandra Wickramasinghe, The extragalactic universe: an alternative view, Nature 346:807-812, 30 August 1990.

The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion,1993, ISBN 1559210834 [65]

With G. Burbridge and Narlikar J.V. A Different Approach to Cosmology, Cambridge University Press 2000, ISBN 0521662230

A mosaic by Boris Anrep depicting Fred Hoyle as a steeplejack climbing to the stars, with a book under his arm, in the National Gallery, London.

Hoyle also wrote science fiction. In his first novel, The Black Cloud, most intelligent life in the universe takes the form of interstellar gas clouds; they are surprised to learn that intelligent life can also form on planets. He wrote a television series, A for Andromeda, which was also published as a novel. His play Rockets in Ursa Major had a professional production at the Mermaid Theatre in 1962.

The Black Cloud, 1957

Ossian's Ride, 1959

October the First Is Too Late, 1966

Element 79 (collection of short stories), 1967

Rockets in Ursa Major, 1969 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

Seven Steps to the Sun, 1970 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Inferno, 10/1973 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Molecule Men and the Monster of Loch Ness, 1973 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

Into Deepest Space, 1974 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Incandescent Ones, 1977 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Westminster Disaster, 1978 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle and Edited by Barbara Hoyle)

Comet Halley, 11/1985

The Frozen Planet of Azuron, 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Energy Pirate, 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Planet of Death, 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

The Giants of Universal Park, 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)

Most of these are independent of each other. Andromeda Breakthrough is a sequel to A for Andromeda and Into Deepest Space is a sequel to Rockets in Ursa Major. The four Ladybird Books are intended for children.

Some stories of the collection Element 79 are fantasy, in particular "Welcome to Slippage City" and "The Judgement of Aphrodite". Both introduce mythological characters.

The Telegraph (UK) called him a "masterful" science fiction writer.

Alan P. Lightman and Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, Harvard University Press, 1990. A collection of interviews, mostly with the generation (or two) of cosmologists after Hoyle, but also including an interview with Hoyle himself. Several interviewees testify to Hoyle's influence in popularizing astronomy and cosmology.

Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe, HarperCollins, 1991. ISBN 0330295853 2nd ed. (with new afterword), Back Bay, 1999. Gives a biographical account of modern cosmology in a novel-like fashion. Complementary to Origins.

Douglas Gough, editor, The Scientific Legacy of Fred Hoyle, Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0521824486

Chandra Wickramasinghe, A Journey with Fred Hoyle, World Scientific Pub, 2005. ISBN 9812389121.

A Journey with Frey Hoyle: Second Edition by Chandra Wickramasinghe, World Scientific Publishing Co. 2013. ISBN 978-9814436120

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Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 - 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential .

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Big Bag = Fragor Magnus (Latin)

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The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature.[1] It was first proposed in 1927 by Roman Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form.[2][3][4] These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The overall uniformity of the Universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments. However, physics currently lacks a widely accepted theory of quantum gravity that can successfully model the earliest conditions of the Big Bang.

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Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, and from the collision of neutron stars,[54] and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed.

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1917 painting by Paul Klee

Ab ovo is Latin for "from the beginning, the origin, the egg"

👀 SR

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ab ovo (From the egg) is a 1917 painting by Paul Klee (1879-1940) made during his time in the German Army. It is noteworthy for its sophisticated technique. It employs watercolor on gauze and paper with a chalk ground, which produces a rich texture of triangular, circular, and crescent patterns.

The work is in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland.

Media related to Ab ovo by Paul Klee at Wikimedia Commons

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ab ovo (From the egg) is a 1917 painting by Paul Klee (1879-1940) made during his time in the German Army. It is noteworthy for its sophisticated technique. It employs watercolor on gauze and paper with a chalk ground, which produces a rich texture of triangular, circular, and crescent patterns.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee

✅ SR

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1203639789639835648

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Artist's impression of a binary pulsar

A binary pulsar is a pulsar with a binary companion, often a white dwarf or neutron star. (In at least one case, the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039, the companion neutron star is another pulsar as well.) Binary pulsars are one of the few objects which allow physicists to test general relativity because of the strong gravitational fields in their vicinities. Although the binary companion to the pulsar is usually difficult or impossible to observe directly, its presence can be deduced from the timing of the pulses from the pulsar itself, which can be measured with extraordinary accuracy by radio telescopes.

The binary pulsar PSR B1913+16 (or the "Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar") was first discovered in 1974 at Arecibo by Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. and Russell Hulse, for which they won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. While Hulse was observing the newly discovered pulsar PSR B1913+16, he noticed that the rate at which it pulsed varied regularly. It was concluded that the pulsar was orbiting another star very closely at a high velocity, and that the pulse period was varying due to the Doppler effect: As the pulsar was moving towards Earth, the pulses would be more frequent; and conversely, as it moved away from Earth fewer would be detected in a given time period. One can think of the pulses like the ticks of a clock; changes in the ticking are indications of changes in the pulsars speed toward and away from Earth. Hulse and Taylor also determined that the stars were approximately equally massive by observing these pulse fluctuations, which led them to believe the other object was also a neutron star. Pulses from this system are now tracked to within 15 μs. (Note: Cen X-3 was actually the first "binary pulsar" discovered in 1971, followed by Her X-1 in 1972)

The study of the PSR B1913+16 binary pulsar also led to the first accurate determination of neutron star masses, using relativistic timing effects. When the two bodies are in close proximity, the gravitational field is stronger, the passage of time is slowed - and the time between pulses (or ticks) is lengthened. Then as the pulsar clock travels more slowly through the weakest part of the field it regains time. A special relativistic effect, time dilation, acts around the orbit in a similar fashion. This relativistic time delay is the difference between what one would expect to see if the pulsar were moving at a constant distance and speed around its companion in a circular orbit, and what is actually observed.

Prior to 2015 and the operation of Advanced LIGO, binary pulsars were the only tools scientists had to detect evidence of gravitational waves; Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that two neutron stars would emit gravitational waves as they orbit a common center of mass, which would carry away orbital energy and cause the two stars to draw closer together and shorten their orbital period. A 10-parameter model incorporating information about the pulsar timing, the Keplerian orbits and three post-Keplerian corrections (the rate of periastron advance, a factor for gravitational redshift and time dilation, and a rate of change of the orbital period from gravitational radiation emission) is sufficient to completely model the binary pulsar timing.

The measurements made of the orbital decay of the PSR B1913+16 system were a near perfect match to Einstein's equations. Relativity predicts that over time a binary system's orbital energy will be converted to gravitational radiation. Data collected by Taylor and Joel M. Weisberg and their colleagues of the orbital period of PSR B1913+16 supported this relativistic prediction; they reported in 1982 and subsequently that there was a difference in the observed minimum separation of the two pulsars compared to that expected if the orbital separation had remained constant. In the decade following its discovery the system's orbital period had decreased by about 76 millionths of a second per year - this means that the pulsar was approaching its maximum separation more than a second earlier than it would have if the orbit had remained the same. Subsequent observations continue to show this decrease.

An intermediate-mass binary pulsar (IMBP) is a pulsar-white dwarf binary system with a relatively long spin period of around 10 - 200 ms consisting of a white dwarf with a relatively high mass of approximately [7] The spin periods, magnetic field strengths, and orbital eccentricities of IMBPs are significantly larger than those of low mass binary pulsars (LMBPs).[7] As of 2014, there are fewer than 20 known IMBPs.[8] Examples of IMBPs include PSR J1802-2124[7] and PSR J2222−0137.[8]

The binary system PSR J2222−0137 has an orbital period of about 2.45 days and is found at a distance of 267+1.2
-0.9 0.010 ) has a companion star PSR J2222−0137 B with a minimum mass of approximately 1.3 solar masses (1.319 0.004 ). pc (approximately 870 light-years), making it the second closest known binary pulsar systems (as of 2014) and one of the closest pulsars and neutron stars. ), which would make the system an IMBP. Although initial measurements gave a mass of about 1 solar mass for the PSR J2222−0137 B,[8] The relatively high-mass pulsar (1.831 [9] This meant the companion is a massive white dwarf (only about 8% of white dwarfs have a mass [8] later observations showed that it is actually a high-mass white dwarf[9] and also one of the coolest known white dwarfs, with a temperature less than 3,000 K.[8] PSR J2222−0137 B is likely crystallized, leading to this Earth-sized white dwarf being described as a "diamond-star",[10] similar to the white dwarf companion of PSR J1719-1438, which lies about 4,000 light-years away.[11]

Sometimes the relatively normal companion star of a binary pulsar will swell up to the point that it dumps its outer layers onto the pulsar. This interaction can heat the gas being exchanged between the bodies and produce X-ray light which can appear to pulsate, in a process called the X-ray binary stage. The flow of matter from one stellar body to another often leads to the creation of an accretion disk about the recipient star.

Pulsars also create a "wind" of relativistically outflowing particles, which in the case of binary pulsars can blow away the magnetosphere of their companions and have a dramatic effect on the pulse emission.

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A binary pulsar is a pulsar with a binary companion, often a white dwarf or neutron star. (In at least one case, the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039, the companion neutron star is another pulsar as well.) Binary pulsars are one of the few objects which allow physicists to test general relativity because of the strong gravitational fields in their vicinities.

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PSR B1913+16

First binary puslar discovered.

1993 Nobel Prize in Physics

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Orbital decay of PSR B1913+16.[7] The data points indicate the observed change in the epoch of periastron with date while the parabola illustrates the theoretically expected change in epoch according to general relativity.

The Hulse-Taylor pulsar (known as PSR B1913+16, PSR J1915+1606 or PSR 1913+16) is a binary star system composed of a neutron star and a pulsar which orbit around their common center of mass. It is the first binary pulsar ever discovered.

The pulsar was discovered by Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1974. Their discovery of the system and analysis of it earned them the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

Using the Arecibo 305 m dish, Hulse and Taylor detected pulsed radio emissions and thus identified the source as a pulsar, a rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron star. The neutron star rotates on its axis 17 times per second; thus the pulse period is 59 milliseconds.

After timing the radio pulses for some time, Hulse and Taylor noticed that there was a systematic variation in the arrival time of the pulses. Sometimes, the pulses were received a little sooner than expected; sometimes, later than expected. These variations changed in a smooth and repetitive manner, with a period of 7.75 hours. They realized that such behavior is predicted if the pulsar were in a binary orbit with another star, later confirmed to be another neutron star.

The pulsar and its neutron star companion both follow elliptical orbits around their common center of mass. The period of the orbital motion is 7.75 hours, and the two neutron stars are believed to be nearly equal in mass, about 1.4 solar masses. Radio emissions have been detected from only one of the two neutron stars.

The minimum separation at periastron is about 1.1 solar radii; the maximum separation at apastron is 4.8 solar radii. The orbit is inclined at about 45 degrees with respect to the plane of the sky. The orientation of periastron changes by about 4.2 degrees per year in direction of the orbital motion (relativistic precession of periastron). In January 1975, it was oriented so that periastron occurred perpendicular to the line of sight from Earth.

The orbit has decayed since the binary system was initially discovered, in precise agreement with the loss of energy due to gravitational waves described by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. The ratio of observed to predicted rate of orbital decay is calculated to be 0.997 ± 0.002. The total power of the gravitational waves emitted by this system presently is calculated to be 7.35 × 10 ²⁴ watts. For comparison, this is 1.9% of the power radiated in light by the Sun. The Solar System radiates only about 5,000 watts in gravitational waves, due to the much larger distances and orbit times, particularly between the Sun and Jupiter and the relatively small mass of the planets.

With this comparatively large energy loss due to gravitational radiation, the rate of decrease of orbital period is 76.5 microseconds per year, the rate of decrease of semimajor axis is 3.5 meters per year, and the calculated lifetime to final inspiral is 300 million years.

In 2004, Taylor and Joel M. Weisberg published a new analysis of the experimental data to date, concluding that the 0.2% disparity between the data and the predicted results is due to poorly known galactic constants, including the Sun's distance from the Galactic Center, the pulsar's proper motion and its distance from Earth. While there are efforts underway for better measurement of the first two quantities, they saw "little prospect for a significant improvement in knowledge of the pulsar distance," so tighter bounds will be difficult to attain. Taylor and Weisberg also mapped the pulsar's two-dimensional beam structure using the fact that the system's precession leads to varying pulse shapes. They found that the beam shape is latitudinally elongated, and pinched longitudinally near the centre, leading to an overall shape like a figure eight.

In 2016, Weisberg and Huang published further results, still with a 0.16% disparity, finding that the ratio of the observed value compared to the predicted value was 0.9983 ± 0.0016. They name the main driver of this improvement, from 1.8σ to 1σ discrepancy, as being improved galactic constants published in 2014.

Mass of companion: 1.387 M☉

Total mass of the system: 2.828378(7) M☉

Orbital period: 7.751938773864 hr

Eccentricity: 0.6171334

Semi-major axis: 1,950,100 km

Periastron separation: 746,600 km

Apastron separation: 3,153,600 km

Orbital velocity of stars at periastron (relative to center of mass): 450 km/s

Orbital velocity of stars at apastron (relative to center of mass): 110 km/s

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The Hulse-Taylor pulsar (known as PSR B1913+16, PSR J1915+1606 or PSR 1913+16) is a binary star system composed of a neutron star and a pulsar which orbit around their common center of mass. It is the first binary pulsar ever discovered.

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1203145546949459978

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrinkles_in_Time

discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1202423152664383578

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June 11th 2015 - CSIC Golden Medal awarded to Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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June 11th 2015 - CSIC Golden Medal awarded to Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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epsnews.eu/2015/07/csic-golden-medal-awarded-to-professor-dame-jocelyn-bell-burnell/

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Manuscript circa 1470, Cristoforo Majorana

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Inscribed with "Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes" - adapted from line 663 of Book VI (6) of The Aeneid, by Roman poet Virgil. Meaning "It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts"

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made of or having the color of gold.

adorned or decorated with gold.

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T9 used to find LXVIII GO with VVV corner numbers

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T9 used to find LXVIII GO with VVV corner numbers

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1198659083587297350/1202161953783423027

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1202428009878003782

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1202427937673183253

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1202427732580106250

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LIGO detects gravity waves from the collisions of binary systems

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LIGO detects gravity waves from the collisions of binary systems

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discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1202427732580106250

👀 SR

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Made of Gold

Recipients referred to as "laureates"

👀 SR

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The Nobel Prize medal is a gold medal given to recipients of the Nobel Prizes of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Physiology or Medicine since 1901. The medal for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, given since 1968, is awarded with the aforementioned prizes.

Each medal has a portrait of Alfred Nobel in left profile on the obverse. The medals for chemistry, literature, physics, and physiology or medicine have an identical portrait of Nobel with different portraits on the peace and economics prize medals. The medals for chemistry, literature, physics, and physiology or medicine were designed by Erik Lindberg. The peace prize medal was designed by Gustav Vigeland, and the economics prize medal by Gunvor Svensson-Lundqvist.

The medals are struck in 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold and weigh about 175 grams (0.386 lb) each, with the exception of the Economic prize medal which weighs 185g.

The recipients also receive a diploma that details their achievements, and a monetary award from the Nobel Foundation. The voting members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, and the Swedish Academy receive smaller replicas of the prize medals. The chemistry, literature, physics, physiology or medicine prizes are known as the 'Swedish medals'.

Lindberg's portrait of Alfred Nobel on Alexander Fleming's 1945 medal for Medicine

Each medal has a portrait of Alfred Nobel in left profile on the obverse. The medals for Chemistry, Literature, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine have identical obverses, showing the image of Nobel and the years of his birth and death. Nobel's portrait also appears on the obverse of the Peace Prize medal and the Economics Prize medal, but with a slightly different portrait. The names of the chemistry, medicine, literature and physics prize recipients are engraved on the reverse of the medal on a small plate. The names of the peace and economic prize recipients are engraved on the edges of their medals. The Chemistry, Literature, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine medals were designed by Erik Lindberg. The Peace prize medal was designed by Gustav Vigeland, and the Economics prize medal by Gunvor Svensson-Lundqvist.

The inaugural Nobel laureates of 1901 received a 'temporary' medal that was struck in a lesser metal than gold. The first medals were eventually struck in September 1902. The delay was due to the designs needing to be approved by each respective awarding institution. The medals were designed by the sculptor Erik Lindberg.

Between 1902 and 2010 the Nobel Prize medals were struck by the Myntverket, the Swedish royal mint, located in Eskilstuna. In 2011 the medals were made by the Det Norske Myntverket in Kongsberg. The medals have been made by Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna since 2012 with the exception of the peace prize medal which is made by the Det Norske Myntverket.

The medals for the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are identical in design. They are given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The reverse of the medal depicts the Goddess of Nature in the form of Isis as she emerges from clouds holding a cornucopia. The Genius of Science holds the veil which covers Nature's 'cold and austere face'. It was designed by Erik Lindberg and is manufactured by Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna. It is inscribed " Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes" ("It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts") an adaptation of " Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes" from line 663 from book 6 of the by the Roman poet Virgil. A plate below the figures is inscribed with the name of the recipient. The text "REG. ACAD. SCIENT. SUEC." denoting the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is inscribed on the reverse.

The 1950 Nobel Physiology and Medicine Prize of Philip S. Hench.

The medal for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is given by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute. The reverse of the medal depicts the 'Genius of Medicine holding an open book in her lap, collecting the water pouring out from a rock in order to quench a sick girl's thirst'. It is inscribed " Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes" ("It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts") an adaptation of " inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes" from line 663 from book 6 of the by the Roman poet Virgil. A plate below the figures is inscribed with the name of the recipient. The text "REG. UNIVERSITAS MED. CHIR. CAROL." denoting the Karolinska Institute is also inscribed on the reverse. It was designed by Erik Lindberg and is manufactured by Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna.

The medal for the Nobel Prize in Literature is given by the Swedish Academy. The reverse of the medal depicts a ' ... young man sitting under a laurel tree who, enchanted, listens to and writes down the song of the Muse'. The 1923 recipient of the literature medal, W. B. Yeats wrote in his 1925 book The Bounty of Sweden that the medal was " ... charming, decorative, academic design, French in manner, a work of the nineties. It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, 'I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young". It is inscribed " Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes" ("It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts") an adaptation of " inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes" from line 663 from book 6 of the by the Roman poet Virgil. A plate below the figures is inscribed with the name of the recipient. The text "ACAD. SUEC." denoting the Swedish Academy is also inscribed on the reverse. It was designed by Erik Lindberg and is manufactured by Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna.

The 1974 Nobel Peace Prize of Eisaku Satō.

The medal for the Nobel Peace Prize was designed by the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland in 1901. Vigeland's profile sculpture of Alfred Nobel differs from Lindberg's. The dies for Vigeland's peace medal were made by Lindberg as Vigeland was not an engraver. The reverse of the medal features three men in a 'fraternal bond' and the inscription ' Pro pace et fraternitate gentium' ("For the peace and brotherhood of men"). The edge of the medal is inscribed with the year of its awarding, with the name of its recipient and "Prix Nobel de la Paix".

The medal for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was designed by Gunvor Svensson-Lundqvist in 1968. The obverse of the medal depicts Alfred Nobel and the words "Sveriges Riksbank till Alfred Nobels Minne 1968" ("The Sveriges Riksbank, in memory of Alfred Nobel, 1968") with the symbol of the Sveriges Riksbank, the horn of plenty, displayed below. The name of the recipient is inscribed on the edge of the medal. The reverse features the emblem of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the North Star, in a design from 1815. "Kungliga Vetenskaps Akademien" ("The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences") is inscribed around the edge of the star. It is the only medal without a quotation on its reverse. Since 2012 the economics medal has been manufactured by Svenska Medalj in Eskilstuna.

The medals are struck in 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold. All medals made before 1980 were struck in 23 carat gold. The weight of each medal varies with the value of gold, but averages about 175 grams (0.386 lb) for each medal, with the exception of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences which weighs 185g. The diameter is 66 millimetres (2.6 in) and the thickness varies between 5.2 millimetres (0.20 in) and 2.4 millimetres (0.094 in).

During World War II, the medals of German scientists Max von Laue and James Franck were sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark, Hungarian chemist (and Nobel laureate himself) George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia (nitro- hydrochloric acid), to prevent confiscation by Nazi Germany and to prevent legal problems for the holders. After the war, the gold was recovered from solution, and the medals re-cast.

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The Nobel Prize medal is a gold medal given to recipients of the Nobel Prizes of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Physiology or Medicine since 1901. The medal for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, given since 1968, is awarded with the aforementioned prizes.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817

GW 170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) signal observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating from the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO

a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves

In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry C. Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

👀 SR

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

555 = L

99 = X

444 = I

888 = V

666 = O

4 = G

✅ SR

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"BTW has this been posted, been scrolling for hours now, I will give you a little tease…"

https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1201631992400314468

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veni,_vidi,_vici

👀 SR

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Plate 14: Lacerta, Cygnus, Lyra, and Vulpecula and Anser

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Card 32 illustrates twelve constellations: nine modern ones (Corvus, Crater, Sextans [here Sextans Uraniæ], Hydra, Lupus, Centaurus, Antlia [here Antlia Pneumatica], and Pyxis [here Pyxis Nautica]), the now-subdivided Argo Navis, and the former constellations Noctua and Felis.

Urania's Mirror; or, a view of the Heavens is a set of 32 astronomical star chart cards, first published in November 1824. They are illustrations based on Alexander Jamieson's A Celestial Atlas, but the addition of holes punched in them allow them to be held up to a light to see a depiction of the constellation's stars. They were engraved by Sidney Hall, and were said to be designed by "a lady", but have since been identified as the work of the Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam, an assistant master at Rugby School.

The cover of the box-set depicts Urania, the muse of astronomy. It originally came with a book entitled A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy... written as an accompaniment. Peter Hingley, the researcher who solved the mystery of who designed the cards a hundred and seventy years after their publication, considered them amongst the most attractive star chart cards of the many produced in the early 19th century.

A high-resolution scan of the front box of "Urania's Mirror" (First edition).

Urania's Mirror illustrates 79 constellations on 32 separate cards. Some of the illustrated constellations are now obsolete, as are some of the subconstellations, such as Caput Medusæ (the head of Medusa, carried by Perseus). Urania's Mirror was originally advertised as including "all the constellations visible in the British Empire", but, in fact, it left out some southern constellations. By the second edition (1825), advertisements merely claimed illustration of the constellations visible from "Great Britain". Some cards focus on a single constellation, others include several, with Card 32, centered on Hydra, illustrating twelve constellations (several of which are no longer recognised). Card 28 has six, and no other card has more than four. Each card measures 8 inches by (about 20 by 14 cm). A book by Jehoshaphat Aspin entitled A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy (or, to give its full name, A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy, Explaining the General Phenomena of the Celestial Bodies; with Numerous Graphical Illustrations) was written to accompany the cards. The cards and book came in a box illustrated with a woman almost certainly intended to be Urania, muse of astronomy. The cards and book were originally published by Samuel Leigh, 18 Strand, London, although, by the fourth edition, the publishing firm had moved to 421 Strand and changed its name to M. A. Leigh.

P.D. Hingley calls Urania's Mirror "one of the most charming and visually attractive of the many aids to astronomical self-instruction produced in the early nineteenth century". On its main gimmick, the holes in the stars meant to show the constellation when held in front of a light, he notes that, as the size of the holes marked correspond to the magnitude of the stars, a quite realistic depiction of the constellation is provided. Ian Ridpath mostly concurs. He describes the device as an "attractive feature", but notes that, due to the light at the time being provided primarily by candles, many cards likely burned up due to carelessness when trying to hold them in front of the flame. He notes three other attempts to use the same gimmick-Franz Niklaus König's Atlas céleste (1826), Friedrich Braun's Himmels-Atlas in transparenten Karten (1850), and Otto Möllinger's Himmelsatlas (1851), but states that they lack Urania's Mirror' s artistry.

Copying from A Celestial Atlas

The depictions of the constellations in Urania's Mirror are redrawings from those in Alexander Jamieson's A Celestial Atlas, published about three years earlier, and include unique attributes differing from Jamieson's sky atlas, including the new constellation of Noctua the owl, and "Norma Nilotica" - a measuring device for the Nile floods - held by Aquarius the water bearer.

Mystery of the designer, and solution

Advertisements for Urania's Mirror, as well as the introduction to its companion book A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy, credit the design of the cards simply to a "lady", who is described in the introduction of the book as being "young". This led to speculation as to her identity. Some proposed prominent female astronomers such as Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville, others credited the engraver Sidney Hall. The designer's identity remained unknown for 170 years. In 1994, while archiving early election certificates used to propose people to be admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, P. D. Hingley found one proposing the Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam and naming him as "Author of Urania's Mirror". While he had several notable sons, he has no other known publications, his main distinction being to have served as assistant master at Rugby School for 38 years.

The reasons for the disguise are unknown. Hingley notes that many contemporary publications attempted to suggest women had played a role in their creation, perhaps to make them sound less threatening. He suggests that anonymity might have been necessary to protect Bloxam's position at Rugby, but notes Rugby was quite progressive, which makes this unlikely; and, finally, suggests modesty as a possibility. Ian Ridpath, noting the plagiarism of the art from A Celestial Atlas, suggests that this alone might be sufficient to cause the author to wish to remain anonymous.

Second edition "Pisces", with the surrounding stars. "Fully coloured".

A December 1824 advertisement, which states the cards were "just published", offered the cards "plain" at £1/8s or "fully coloured" for £1/14s. This first edition did not include any stars surrounding the named constellations, leaving those parts blank. This was changed for the second edition, which added back stars around those constellations. An American edition was published in 1832. Modern reprints were produced in 1993, and Barnes & Noble reproduced the American edition (with accompanying book) in 2004. The accompanying book, A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy by Jehoshaphat Aspin went through at least four editions, with the last coming out in 1834. The second edition featured a marked expansion in content, growing from 121 pages in the first edition to 200 pages in the second. The book, by the time of the 1834 American edition, consisted of an introduction, a list of the northern and southern constellations, a description of each of the plates, with the history and background of the constellations depicted, and an alphabetical list of named stars (such as Achernar) with their Bayer designation, magnitude, and respective constellation.

A "Second Part" of Urania's Mirror, which was to have included illustrations of the planets and a portable orrery, was advertised, but no evidence exists to show it was ever released.

The constellations depicted, in the order they are listed on the cards, are:

In addition, Mons Mænalus is shown below Boötes, Caput Medusæ is shown as part of Perseus, and Cerberus is shown with Hercules.

1. ^ "Advertisement". Monthly Critical Gazette. London: Sherwood, Jones, and Co. December 1824. p. 578. See also File:Advertisement for Urania's Mirror.png.

2. ^ Taken from the reproduction of the book included in the 2004 Barnes and Noble facsimile edition of the Urania's Mirror set.

3. ^ "[Advertisement]". The Quarterly Literary Advertiser (Part of the Quarterly Literary Journal). Duke-Street, Piccadilly, London: John Sharpe. October 1828: 17. 1828.

4. An obsolete plural form of the name of the constellation ^ Triangulum

5. ^ Hill, John (1754). "Fluvius". Urania: Or, a Compleat View of the Heavens; Containing the Antient and Modern Astronomy, in Form of a Dictionary: Illustrated with a Great Number of Figures ... A Work Intended for General Use, Intelligible to All Capacities, and Calculated for Entertainment as Well as Instruction. London: T. Gardner. p. [unpaginated].

6. ^ Hill, John (1754). "Pigeon". Urania: Or, a Compleat View of the Heavens; Containing the Antient and Modern Astronomy, in Form of a Dictionary: Illustrated with a Great Number of Figures ... A Work Intended for General Use, Intelligible to All Capacities, and Calculated for Entertainment as Well as Instruction. London: T. Gardner. p. [unpaginated].

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Urania's Mirror; or, a view of the Heavens is a set of 32 astronomical star chart cards, first published in November 1824. They are illustrations based on Alexander Jamieson's A Celestial Atlas , but the addition of holes punched in them allow them to be held up to a light to see a depiction of the constellation's stars.

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Gold

Egg

Latin

Space

Suspected Truths:

GOld

Egg

Latin

Space

Mirror

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Brightest star in the Vulpecula constellation.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Location of α Vulpeculae (circled)

Observation data
Epoch J2000.0 Equinox J2000.0

Constellation

Vulpecula

Right ascension

19 h 28 m 42.3299 s [1]

Apparent magnitude (V)

4.40[2]

Characteristics

Evolutionary stage

red giant[3]

Astrometry

Radial velocity (Rv)
−84.91±0.26 [5] km/s

Proper motion (μ)
RA: −126.197±0.071 [1] mas/ yr
Dec.: −106.865±0.111 [1] mas/ yr

Parallax (π)
11.2238 ± 0.1129 mas[1]

Distance
291 ± 3 ly
(89.1 ± 0.9 pc)

Absolute magnitude (MV)
−0.36[6]

Details[7]

Mass
0.97 M☉

Radius
43.14 R☉

Luminosity
415.9 L☉

Surface gravity (log g)
1.30 cgs

Temperature
3,690 K

Metallicity [Fe/H]

-0.38[8] dex

Rotational velocity (v sin i)
4.6[5] km/s

Age
11.30 Gyr

Other designations

Anser, α Vul, 6 Vulpeculae, BD+24°3759, FK5 1508, HD 183439, HIP 95771, HR 7405, SAO 87261, CCDM J19288+2442A, WDS J19287+2440A [9]

Database references

SIMBAD data

Alpha Vulpeculae ( α Vulpeculae, abbreviated Alpha Vul, α Vul), officially named Anser ,[10] is the brightest star in the constellation of Vulpecula. It is approximately 291 light-years from Earth. It forms a wide optical binary with 8 Vulpeculae.[11]

Alpha Vulpeculae is a red giant of spectral class M1 and has an apparent magnitude of +4.4. It has been analyzed as a member of the Arcturus stream, a group of stars with high proper motion and metal-poor properties thought to be the remnants of a small galaxy consumed by the Milky Way.[12]

Nomenclature [ edit ]

α Vulpeculae ( Latinised to Alpha Vulpeculae) is the system's Bayer designation.

It bore the traditional name Anser, derived from when the constellation had the name Vulpecula cum Ansere 'the little fox with the goose'.[13] In 2016, the IAU organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN)[14] to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN approved the name Anser for this star on 30 June 2017 and it is now so included in the List of IAU-approved Star Names.[10]

Description [ edit ]

Amateur image of the dark nebula LDN 778 (center) and Alpha Vulpeculae, (red giant, top center).

α Vulpeculae has evolved away from the 3,690 main sequence after exhausting its core hydrogen and is now a red giant, probably on the red giant branch.[3] It is about 11.3 billion years since it first formed.[7] It has an effective surface temperature of K and a bolometric luminosity of 416 L☉, meaning that its radius is 43 R☉.

α Vulpeculae has been suspected to be variable in brightness by about a tenth of a magnitude, but this has never been confirmed.[15] Analysis of the isotopic ratios in its photosphere show that it has a mass less than 1.5 M☉ and has not yet evolved to the asymptotic giant branch and experienced a third dredge up.[3]

References [ edit ]

1. ^ (Erratum: Brown, A. G. A.; et al. (Gaia collaboration) (2021). "Gaia Early Data Release 3: Summary of the contents and survey properties". Astronomy & Astrophysics. 649: A1. arXiv:2012.01533. Bibcode:2021A&A...649A...1G. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202039657. S2CID 227254300. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202039657e). Gaia EDR3 record for this source at VizieR.

2. ^ Mermilliod, J.-C. (1986), "Compilation of Eggen's UBV data, transformed to UBV (unpublished)", Catalogue of Eggen's UBV Data. SIMBAD, Bibcode:1986EgUBV........0M.

3. ^ Lebzelter, Thomas; Hinkle, Kenneth H.; Straniero, Oscar; Lambert, David L.; Pilachowski, Catherine A.; Nault, Kristie A. (2019), "Carbon and Oxygen Isotopic Ratios. II. Semiregular Variable M Giants", The Astrophysical Journal, 886 (2): 117, arXiv:1912.04386, Bibcode:2019ApJ...886..117L, doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab4e9b, S2CID 209140544.

4. ^ Morgan, W. W.; Keenan, P. C. (1973), "Spectral Classification", Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 11: 29, Bibcode:1973ARA&A..11...29M, doi:10.1146/annurev.aa.11.090173.000333.

5. ^ Massarotti, Alessandro; et al. (January 2008), "Rotational and radial velocities for a sample of 761 HIPPARCOS giants and the role of binarity", The Astronomical Journal, 135 (1): 209-231, Bibcode:2008AJ....135..209M, doi:10.1088/0004-6256/135/1/209.

6. ^ Anderson, E.; Francis, Ch. (2012), "XHIP: An extended hipparcos compilation", Astronomy Letters, 38 (5): 331, arXiv:1108.4971, Bibcode:2012AstL...38..331A, doi:10.1134/S1063773712050015, S2CID 119257644.

7. ^ Baines, Ellyn K.; Armstrong, J. Thomas; Schmitt, Henrique R.; Zavala, R. T.; Benson, James A.; Hutter, Donald J.; Tycner, Christopher; Belle, Gerard T. van (2017), "Fundamental Parameters of 87 Stars from the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer", The Astronomical Journal, 155 (1): 30, arXiv:1712.08109, Bibcode:2018AJ....155...30B, doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aa9d8b, S2CID 119427037.

8. ^ Huang, Y.; Liu, X.-W.; Yuan, H.-B.; Xiang, M.-S.; Chen, B.-Q.; Zhang, H.-W. (2015), "Empirical metallicity-dependent calibrations of effective temperature against colours for dwarfs and giants based on interferometric data", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 454 (3): 2863-2889, arXiv:1508.06080, Bibcode:2015MNRAS.454.2863H, doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1991.

9. ^ "HD 20781". SIMBAD. Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg.

10. ^ Naming Stars, IAU.org.

11. ^ Washington Double Star Catalog, United States Naval Observatory, archived from the original on 2011-02-14.

12. ^ Eggen, Olin (1971), "The Arcturus Group", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 83 (493): 271-85, Bibcode:1971PASP...83..271E, doi:10.1086/129120.

13. ^ Barentine, John C. (2016), "Anser", The Lost Constellations, pp. 35-45, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22795-5_3, ISBN 978-3-319-22794-8.

14. ^ IAU Working Group on Star Names (WGSN).

15. ^ Samus, N. N.; Durlevich, O. V.; et al. (2009), "VizieR Online Data Catalog: General Catalogue of Variable Stars (Samus+ 2007-2013)", VizieR On-line Data Catalog: B/GCVS. Originally Published in: 2009yCat....102025S, 1: B/gcvs, Bibcode:2009yCat....102025S.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Location of α Vulpeculae (circled) Observation data Epoch J2000.0 Equinox J2000.0 Constellation Vulpecula Right ascension 19 h 28 m 42.3299 s [1] Apparent magnitude (V) 4.40[2] Characteristics Evolutionary stage red giant [3] Astrometry Radial velocity (Rv) −84.91±0.26 [5] km/s Proper motion (μ) RA: −126.197±0.071 [1]

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Discovered the Arcturus Stream, in which Alpha Vulpeculae (Anser) resides.

Surname can be created from 1.2.0 patch notes letters.

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Goose in Latin = Anser

Anser = Brightest star in Vulpecula

A "question" needs an "answer"

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulpecula

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Dimensions: 6 x 666

https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1194784344770883654

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November 6th 2015. 11/06 can also be read as June 11th 2015.

Image modification date of tfee_ques.jpg and tfee_tion.jpg

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6 down: Who told "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" : AESOP

57 across: Leader at the Battle of Alesia : CAESAR

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Friday, November 6, 2015 NYT crossword by Ian Livengood

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New York Times Friday, November 6, 2015 NYT crossword by Ian Livengood, with commentary

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21

Source located in the Vulpecula constellation

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A pulsar (from Pulsating Radio Sources) is a highly magnetized rotating compact star (usually neutron stars but also white dwarfs) that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles. This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Earth (similar to the way a lighthouse can be seen only when the light is pointed in the direction of an observer), and is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission. Neutron stars are very dense and have short, regular rotational periods. This produces a very precise interval between pulses that ranges from milliseconds to seconds for an individual pulsar. Pulsars are one of the candidates for the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. (See also centrifugal mechanism of acceleration.)

The periods of pulsars make them very useful tools for astronomers. Observations of a pulsar in a binary neutron star system were used to indirectly confirm the existence of gravitational radiation. The first extrasolar planets were discovered around a pulsar, PSR B1257+12. In 1983, certain types of pulsars were detected that at that time exceeded the accuracy of atomic clocks in keeping time.

The first pulsar was observed on November 28, 1967, by Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish. They observed pulses separated by approximately 1.33 seconds that originated from the same location in the sky, and kept to sidereal time. In looking for explanations for the pulses, the short period of the pulses eliminated most astrophysical sources of radiation, such as stars, and since the pulses followed sidereal time, it could not be human-made radio frequency interference.

When observations with another telescope confirmed the emission, it eliminated any sort of instrumental effects. At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem-if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?" Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for " little green men" (a playful name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin).

It was not until a second pulsating source was discovered in a different part of the sky that the "LGM hypothesis" was entirely abandoned. Their pulsar was later dubbed CP 1919, and is now known by a number of designators including PSR B1919+21 and PSR J1921+2153. Although CP 1919 emits in radio wavelengths, pulsars have subsequently been found to emit in visible light, X-ray, and gamma ray wavelengths. The word "pulsar" is a portmanteau of 'pulsating' and ' quasar', and first appeared in print in 1968:

An entirely novel kind of star came to light on Aug. 6 last year and was referred to, by astronomers, as LGM (Little Green Men). Now it is thought to be a novel type between a white dwarf and a neutron [star]. The name Pulsar is likely to be given to it. Dr. A. Hewish told me yesterday: '... I am sure that today every radio telescope is looking at the Pulsars.'

The existence of neutron stars was first proposed by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934, when they argued that a small, dense star consisting primarily of neutrons would result from a supernova.[12] Based on the idea of magnetic flux conservation from magnetic main sequence stars, Lodewijk Woltjer proposed in 1964 that such neutron stars might contain magnetic fields as large as 10 ¹⁴ to 10 ¹⁶ G.[13] In 1967, shortly before the discovery of pulsars, Franco Pacini suggested that a rotating neutron star with a magnetic field would emit radiation, and even noted that such energy could be pumped into a supernova remnant around a neutron star, such as the Crab Nebula.[14] After the discovery of the first pulsar, Thomas Gold independently suggested a rotating neutron star model similar to that of Pacini, and explicitly argued that this model could explain the pulsed radiation observed by Bell Burnell and Hewish.[15] In 1968, Richard V. E. Lovelace with collaborators discovered period ms of the Crab Nebula pulsar using Arecibo Observatory.[16] [17] The discovery of the Crab pulsar provided confirmation of the rotating neutron star model of pulsars.[18] The Crab pulsar 33- millisecond pulse period was too short to be consistent with other proposed models for pulsar emission. Moreover, the Crab pulsar is so named because it is located at the center of the Crab Nebula, consistent with the 1933 prediction of Baade and Zwicky.[19] In 1974, Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, who had developed revolutionary radio telescopes, became the first astronomers to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noting that Hewish played a "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars".[20] Considerable controversy is associated with the fact that Hewish was awarded the prize while Bell, who made the initial discovery while she was his PhD student, was not. Bell claims no bitterness upon this point, supporting the decision of the Nobel prize committee.[21]

In 1974, Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. and Russell Hulse discovered for the first time a pulsar in a binary system, PSR B1913+16. This pulsar orbits another neutron star with an orbital period of just eight hours. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that this system should emit strong gravitational radiation, causing the orbit to continually contract as it loses orbital energy. Observations of the pulsar soon confirmed this prediction, providing the first ever evidence of the existence of gravitational waves. As of 2010, observations of this pulsar continue to agree with general relativity. In 1993, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Taylor and Hulse for the discovery of this pulsar.

In 1982, Don Backer led a group which discovered PSR B1937+21, a pulsar with a rotation period of just 1.6 milliseconds (38,500 rpm). Observations soon revealed that its magnetic field was much weaker than ordinary pulsars, while further discoveries cemented the idea that a new class of object, the " millisecond pulsars" (MSPs) had been found. MSPs are believed to be the end product of X-ray binaries. Owing to their extraordinarily rapid and stable rotation, MSPs can be used by astronomers as clocks rivaling the stability of the best atomic clocks on Earth. Factors affecting the arrival time of pulses at Earth by more than a few hundred nanoseconds can be easily detected and used to make precise measurements. Physical parameters accessible through pulsar timing include the 3D position of the pulsar, its proper motion, the electron content of the interstellar medium along the propagation path, the orbital parameters of any binary companion, the pulsar rotation period and its evolution with time. (These are computed from the raw timing data by Tempo, a computer program specialized for this task.) After these factors have been taken into account, deviations between the observed arrival times and predictions made using these parameters can be found and attributed to one of three possibilities: intrinsic variations in the spin period of the pulsar, errors in the realization of Terrestrial Time against which arrival times were measured, or the presence of background gravitational waves. Scientists are currently attempting to resolve these possibilities by comparing the deviations seen between several different pulsars, forming what is known as a pulsar timing array. The goal of these efforts is to develop a pulsar-based time standard precise enough to make the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves. In June 2006, the astronomer John Middleditch and his team at LANL announced the first prediction of pulsar glitches with observational data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. They used observations of the pulsar PSR J0537−6910.

In 1992, Aleksander Wolszczan discovered the first extrasolar planets around PSR B1257+12. This discovery presented important evidence concerning the widespread existence of planets outside the Solar System, although it is very unlikely that any life form could survive in the environment of intense radiation near a pulsar.

In 2016, AR Scorpii was identified as the first pulsar in which the compact object is a white dwarf instead of a neutron star. Because its moment of inertia is much higher than that of a neutron star, the white dwarf in this system rotates once every 1.97 minutes, far slower than neutron-star pulsars. The system displays strong pulsations from ultraviolet to radio wavelengths, powered by the spin-down of the strongly magnetized white dwarf.

Initially pulsars were named with letters of the discovering observatory followed by their right ascension (e.g. CP 1919). As more pulsars were discovered, the letter code became unwieldy, and so the convention then arose of using the letters PSR (Pulsating Source of Radio) followed by the pulsar's right ascension and degrees of declination (e.g. PSR 0531+21) and sometimes declination to a tenth of a degree (e.g. PSR 1913+16.7). Pulsars appearing very close together sometimes have letters appended (e.g. PSR 0021−72C and PSR 0021−72D).

The modern convention prefixes the older numbers with a B (e.g. PSR B1919+21), with the B meaning the coordinates are for the 1950.0 epoch. All new pulsars have a J indicating 2000.0 coordinates and also have declination including minutes (e.g. PSR J1921+2153). Pulsars that were discovered before 1993 tend to retain their B names rather than use their J names (e.g. PSR J1921+2153 is more commonly known as PSR B1919+21). Recently discovered pulsars only have a J name (e.g. PSR J0437−4715). All pulsars have a J name that provides more precise coordinates of its location in the sky.

Formation, mechanism, turn off

The events leading to the formation of a pulsar begin when the core of a massive star is compressed during a supernova, which collapses into a neutron star. The neutron star retains most of its angular momentum, and since it has only a tiny fraction of its progenitor's radius (and therefore its moment of inertia is sharply reduced), it is formed with very high rotation speed. A beam of radiation is emitted along the magnetic axis of the pulsar, which spins along with the rotation of the neutron star. The magnetic axis of the pulsar determines the direction of the electromagnetic beam, with the magnetic axis not necessarily being the same as its rotational axis. This misalignment causes the beam to be seen once for every rotation of the neutron star, which leads to the "pulsed" nature of its appearance.

In rotation-powered pulsars, the beam is the result of the rotational energy of the neutron star, which generates an electrical field from the movement of the very strong magnetic field, resulting in the acceleration of protons and electrons on the star surface and the creation of an electromagnetic beam emanating from the poles of the magnetic field. Observations by NICER of J0030−0451 indicate that both beams originate from hotspots located on the south pole and that there may be more than two such hotspots on that star. This rotation slows down over time as electromagnetic power is emitted. When a pulsar's spin period slows down sufficiently, the radio pulsar mechanism is believed to turn off (the so-called "death line"). This turn-off seems to take place after about 10-100 million years, which means of all the neutron stars born in the 13.6 billion year age of the universe, around 99% no longer pulsate.

Though the general picture of pulsars as rapidly rotating neutron stars is widely accepted, Werner Becker of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in 2006, "The theory of how pulsars emit their radiation is still in its infancy, even after nearly forty years of work."

Three distinct classes of pulsars are currently known to astronomers, according to the source of the power of the electromagnetic radiation:

Although all three classes of objects are neutron stars, their observable behavior and the underlying physics are quite different. There are, however, some connections. For example, X-ray pulsars are probably old rotationally-powered pulsars that have already lost most of their power, and have only become visible again after their binary companions had expanded and begun transferring matter on to the neutron star.

The process of accretion can, in turn, transfer enough angular momentum to the neutron star to "recycle" it as a rotation-powered millisecond pulsar. As this matter lands on the neutron star, it is thought to "bury" the magnetic field of the neutron star (although the details are unclear), leaving millisecond pulsars with magnetic fields 1000-10,000 times weaker than average pulsars. This low magnetic field is less effective at slowing the pulsar's rotation, so millisecond pulsars live for billions of years, making them the oldest known pulsars. Millisecond pulsars are seen in globular clusters, which stopped forming neutron stars billions of years ago.

Of interest to the study of the state of the matter in a neutron star are the observed in the rotation velocity of the neutron star. This velocity decreases slowly but steadily, except for an occasional sudden variation - a " glitch". One model put forward to explain these glitches is that they are the result of "starquakes" that adjust the crust of the neutron star. Models where the glitch is due to a decoupling of the possibly superconducting interior of the star have also been advanced. In both cases, the star's moment of inertia changes, but its angular momentum does not, resulting in a change in rotation rate.

When two massive stars are born close together from the same cloud of gas, they can form a binary system and orbit each other from birth. If those two stars are at least a few times as massive as our sun, their lives will both end in supernova explosions. The more massive star explodes first, leaving behind a neutron star. If the explosion does not kick the second star away, the binary system survives. The neutron star can now be visible as a radio pulsar, and it slowly loses energy and spins down. Later, the second star can swell up, allowing the neutron star to suck up its matter. The matter falling onto the neutron star spins it up and reduces its magnetic field.

This is called "recycling" because it returns the neutron star to a quickly-spinning state. Finally, the second star also explodes in a supernova, producing another neutron star. If this second explosion also fails to disrupt the binary, a double neutron star binary is formed. Otherwise, the spun-up neutron star is left with no companion and becomes a "disrupted recycled pulsar", spinning between a few and 50 times per second.

The discovery of pulsars allowed astronomers to study an object never observed before, the neutron star. This kind of object is the only place where the behavior of matter at nuclear density can be observed (though not directly). Also, millisecond pulsars have allowed a test of general relativity in conditions of an intense gravitational field.

Pulsar maps have been included on the two Pioneer plaques as well as the Voyager Golden Record. They show the position of the Sun, relative to 14 pulsars, which are identified by the unique timing of their electromagnetic pulses, so that our position both in space and in time can be calculated by potential extraterrestrial intelligences. Because pulsars are emitting very regular pulses of radio waves, its radio transmissions do not require daily corrections. Moreover, pulsar positioning could create a spacecraft navigation system independently, or be used in conjunction with satellite navigation.

X-ray pulsar-based navigation and timing (XNAV) or simply pulsar navigation is a navigation technique whereby the periodic X-ray signals emitted from pulsars are used to determine the location of a vehicle, such as a spacecraft in deep space. A vehicle using XNAV would compare received X-ray signals with a database of known pulsar frequencies and locations. Similar to GPS, this comparison would allow the vehicle to calculate its position accurately (±5 km). The advantage of using X-ray signals over radio waves is that X-ray telescopes can be made smaller and lighter. Experimental demonstrations have been reported in 2018.

Generally, the regularity of pulsar emission does not rival the stability of atomic clocks. They can still be used as external reference. For example, J0437−4715 has a period of 0.005757451936712637 s with an error of . This stability allows millisecond pulsars to be used in establishing ephemeris time or in building pulsar clocks.

Timing noise is the name for rotational irregularities observed in all pulsars. This timing noise is observable as random wandering in the pulse frequency or phase. It is unknown whether timing noise is related to pulsar glitches.

The radiation from pulsars passes through the interstellar medium (ISM) before reaching Earth. Free electrons in the warm (8000 K), ionized component of the ISM and H II regions affect the radiation in two primary ways. The resulting changes to the pulsar's radiation provide an important probe of the ISM itself.

Because of the dispersive nature of the interstellar plasma, lower-frequency radio waves travel through the medium slower than higher-frequency radio waves. The resulting delay in the arrival of pulses at a range of frequencies is directly measurable as the dispersion measure of the pulsar. The dispersion measure is the total column density of free electrons between the observer and the pulsar,

where is the distance from the pulsar to the observer and is the electron density of the ISM. The dispersion measure is used to construct models of the free electron distribution in the Milky Way.[48]

Additionally, turbulence in the interstellar gas causes density inhomogeneities in the ISM which cause scattering of the radio waves from the pulsar. The resulting scintillation of the radio waves-the same effect as the twinkling of a star in visible light due to density variations in the Earth's atmosphere-can be used to reconstruct information about the small scale variations in the ISM. Due to the high velocity (up to several hundred km/s) of many pulsars, a single pulsar scans the ISM rapidly, which results in changing scintillation patterns over timescales of a few minutes.

Pulsars orbiting within the curved space-time around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, could serve as probes of gravity in the strong-field regime. Arrival times of the pulses would be affected by special- and general-relativistic Doppler shifts and by the complicated paths that the radio waves would travel through the strongly curved space-time around the black hole. In order for the effects of general relativity to be measurable with current instruments, pulsars with orbital periods less than about 10 years would need to be discovered; such pulsars would orbit at distances inside 0.01 pc from Sgr A*. Searches are currently underway; at present, five pulsars are known to lie within 100 pc from Sgr A*.

There are 3 consortia around the world which use pulsars to search for gravitational waves. In Europe, there is the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA); there is the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) in Australia; and there is the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) in Canada and the US. Together, the consortia form the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA). The pulses from Millisecond Pulsars (MSPs) are used as a system of Galactic clocks. Disturbances in the clocks will be measurable at Earth. A disturbance from a passing gravitational wave will have a particular signature across the ensemble of pulsars, and will be thus detected.

The pulsars listed here were either the first discovered of its type, or represent an extreme of some type among the known pulsar population, such as having the shortest measured period.

The first radio pulsar "CP 1919" (now known as PSR B1919+21), with a pulse period of 1.337 seconds and a pulse width of 0.04-second, was discovered in 1967.

The first binary pulsar, PSR 1913+16, whose orbit is decaying at the exact rate predicted due to the emission of gravitational radiation by general relativity

The brightest radio pulsar, the Vela Pulsar.

The first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21

The brightest millisecond pulsar, PSR J0437−4715

The first X-ray pulsar, Cen X-3

The first accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar, SAX J1808.4−3658

The first pulsar with planets, PSR B1257+12

The first pulsar observed to have been affected by asteroids: PSR J0738−4042

The first double pulsar binary system, PSR J0737−3039

The shortest period pulsar, PSR J1748−2446ad, with a period of ~0.0014 seconds or ~1.4 milliseconds (716 times a second).

The longest period pulsar, at 118.2 seconds, as well as the only known example of a white dwarf pulsar, AR Scorpii.

The longest period neutron star pulsar, PSR J0250+5854, with a period of 23.5 seconds.

The pulsar with the most stable period, PSR J0437−4715

The first millisecond pulsar with 2 stellar mass companions, PSR J0337+1715

PSR J1841−0500, stopped pulsing for 580 days. One of only two pulsars known to have stopped pulsing for more than a few minutes.

PSR B1931+24, has a cycle. It pulses for about a week and stops pulsing for about a month. One of only two pulsars known to have stopped pulsing for more than a few minutes.

PSR J1903+0327, a ~2.15 ms pulsar discovered to be in a highly eccentric binary star system with a Sun-like star.

PSR J2007+2722, a 40.8-hertz 'recycled' isolated pulsar was the first pulsar found by volunteers on data taken in February 2007 and analyzed by distributed computing project Einstein@Home.

PSR J1311-3430, the first millisecond pulsar discovered via gamma-ray pulsations and part of a binary system with the shortest orbital period.

1. ^ S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1977). "Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?". Cosmic Search Magazine. (after-dinner speech with the title of Petit Four given at the Eighth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics; first published in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 302, pp. 685-689, Dec., 1977)

2. Courtland, Rachel. "^ Pulsar Detected by Gamma Waves Only". New Scientist, 17 October 2008.

3. ^ Gold, T. (1968). "Rotating Neutron Stars as the Origin of the Pulsating Radio Sources". Nature. 218 (5143): 731-732. Bibcode:1968Natur.218..731G. doi:10.1038/218731a0. S2CID 4217682.

4. ^ ``Crab nebula pulsar NP 0532 1969, J. M. Comella, H. D. Craft, R. V. E. Lovelace, J. M. Sutton, G. L. Tyler Nature 221 (5179), 453-454

5. ^ ``Digital Search Methods for Pulsars 1969, R. V. E. Lovelace, J. M. Sutton, E. E. Salpeter Nature 222 (5190), 231-233

6. ^ ``On the discovery of the period of the Crab Nebula pulsar R. V. E. Lovelace and G. L. Tyler 2012, The Observatory, 132, 186.

7. Bell Burnell, S. Jocelyn. ^ "Little Green Men, White Dwarfs, or Pulsars?". Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 302, pp. 685-689, Dec. 1977

8. ^ D. Backer; Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Heiles, Carl; Davis, M. M.; Goss, W. M. (1982). "A millisecond pulsar". Nature. 300 (5893): 315-318. Bibcode:1982Natur.300..615B. doi:10.1038/300615a0. S2CID 4247734.

9. ^ "Einstein@Home 'citizen scientists' in the U.S.A. and Germany discover a new pulsar in Arecibo telescope data" (PDF). Albert Einstein Institut (Press release). Hannover, DE: Max Planck Institut für Gravitationsphysik. 2010-08-12. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-08-14. - Background material on "disrupted recycled pulsar" PSR J2007+2722.

10. Marissa Cevallos, ^ Science News, "How to Use a Pulsar to Find Starbucks", Discovery News, Nov 24, 2010.

11. ^ Commissariat, Tushna (4 June 2014). "Pulsars map the way for space missions". Physics World.

12. ^ Becker, Werner; Bernhardt, Mike G.; Jessner, Axel (2013). "Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation With Pulsars". Acta Futura. 7 (7): 11-28. arXiv:. doi:10.2420/AF07.2013.11. S2CID 118570784.

13. ^ Matsakis, D. N.; Taylor, J. H.; Eubanks, T. M. (1997). "A Statistic for Describing Pulsar and Clock Stabilities" (PDF). Astronomy and Astrophysics. 326: 924-928. Bibcode:1997A&A...326..924M.

14. ^ Backer, Don (1984). "The 1.5 Millisecond Pulsar". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 422 (Eleventh Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics): 180-181. Bibcode:1984NYASA.422..180B. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1984.tb23351.x. S2CID 120371785. Archived from the original on 2013-01-05.

15. ^ Taylor, J. H.; Cordes, J. M. (1993). "Pulsar Distances and the Galactic Distribution of Free Electrons". Astrophysical Journal. 411: 674. Bibcode:1993ApJ...411..674T. doi:10.1086/172870.

16. ^ Rickett, Barney J. (1990). "Radio Propagation Through the Turbulent Interstellar Plasma". Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 28: 561-605. Bibcode:1990ARA&A..28..561R. doi:10.1146/annurev.aa.28.090190.003021.

17. ^ Rickett, Barney J.; Lyne, Andrew G.; Gupta, Yashwant (1997). "Interstellar Fringes from Pulsar B0834+06". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 287 (4): 739-752. Bibcode:1997MNRAS.287..739R. doi:10.1093/mnras/287.4.739.

18. ^ Angelil, R.; Saha, P.; Merritt, D. (2010). "Towards relativistic orbit fitting of Galactic center stars and pulsars". The Astrophysical Journal. 720 (2): 1303-1310. arXiv:. Bibcode:2010ApJ...720.1303A. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/720/2/1303. S2CID 118449684.

19. Hewish, A. et al. "^ Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source". Nature, Volume 217, 1968 (pp. 709-713).

20. ^ Pletsch, H. J.; Guillemot; Fehrmann, H.; Allen, B.; Kramer, M.; Aulbert, C.; Ackermann, M.; Ajello, M.; De Angelis, A.; Atwood, W. B.; Baldini, L.; Ballet, J.; Barbiellini, G.; Bastieri, D.; Bechtol, K.; Bellazzini, R.; Borgland, A. W.; Bottacini, E.; Brandt, T. J.; Bregeon, J.; Brigida, M.; Bruel, P.; Buehler, R.; Buson, S.; Caliandro, G. A.; Cameron, R. A.; Caraveo, P. A.; Casandjian, J. M.; Cecchi, C.; et al. (2012). "Binary millisecond pulsar discovery via gamma-ray pulsations". Science. 338 (6112): 1314-1317. arXiv:. Bibcode:2012Sci...338.1314P. doi:10.1126/science.1229054. PMID 23112297. S2CID 206544680.

"Pinning Down a Pulsar's Age". Science News.

"Astronomical whirling dervishes hide their age well". Astronomy Now.

Animation of a Pulsar. Einstein.com, 17 January 2008.

"The Discovery of Pulsars". BBC, 23 December 2002.

"A Pulsar Discovery: First Optical Pulsar". Moments of Discovery, American Institute of Physics, 2007 (Includes audio and teachers guides).

Discovery of Pulsars: Interview with Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jodcast, June 2007 (Low Quality Version).

Audio: Cain/Gay - Astronomy Cast. Pulsars - Nov 2009

"PSR B1919+21". . Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg.

Australia National Telescope Facility: Pulsar Catalogue

Johnston, William Robert. "List of Pulsars in Binary Systems". Johnston Archive, 22 March 2005.

Staff Writers. "Scientists Can Predict Pulsar Starquakes". Space Daily, 7 June 2006.

Staff Writers. "XMM-Newton Makes New Discoveries About Old Pulsars". Space Daily, 27 July 2006.

Than, Ker. "Hot New Idea: How Dead Stars Go Cold". Space.com, 27 July 2006.

"New Kind of Pulsar Discovered". Cosmos Online.

"Astronomers discover the first white dwarf pulsar in history". zmescience.com.

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A pulsar (from Pulsating Radio Sources) is a highly magnetized rotating compact star (usually neutron stars but also white dwarfs) that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles.

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Hermes Trismegistus, Egyption founder of alchemy is shown within the Ripley Scrolls and detailed within the MS196 (an untitled book of Medieval Recipes) to be inventor(?) of something called -

The Philospher's Egg

Herme's Egg

Herme's Vase

A device that plays a part in the creation of the Philosopher's Stone - an alchemical legend that can cure any ill and turn base metals into gold. The endeavour to create the Philosopher's Stone is known as ones Magnum Opus.

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The action of a Caesar cipher is to replace each plaintext letter with a different one a fixed number of places down the alphabet. The cipher illustrated here uses a left shift of three, so that (for example) each occurrence of E in the plaintext becomes B in the ciphertext.

In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a left shift of 3, D would be replaced by A, E would become B, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it in his private correspondence.

The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As with all single-alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in modern practice offers essentially no communications security.

The transformation can be represented by aligning two alphabets; the cipher alphabet is the plain alphabet rotated left or right by some number of positions. For instance, here is a Caesar cipher using a left rotation of three places, equivalent to a right shift of 23 (the shift parameter is used as the key):

When encrypting, a person looks up each letter of the message in the "plain" line and writes down the corresponding letter in the "cipher" line.

Plaintext:  THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
Ciphertext: QEB NRFZH YOLTK CLU GRJMP LSBO QEB IXWV ALD

Deciphering is done in reverse, with a right shift of 3.

The encryption can also be represented using modular arithmetic by first transforming the letters into numbers, according to the scheme, A → 0, B → 1, ..., Z → 25. Encryption of a letter x by a shift n can be described mathematically as,

Decryption is performed similarly,

(Here, "mod" refers to the modulo operation. The value x is in the range 0 to 25, but if or are not in this range then 26 should be added or subtracted.)

The replacement remains the same throughout the message, so the cipher is classed as a type of monoalphabetic substitution, as opposed to polyalphabetic substitution.

The Caesar cipher is named for Julius Caesar, who used an alphabet where decrypting would shift three letters to the left.

The Caesar cipher is named after Julius Caesar, who, according to Suetonius, used it with a shift of three (A becoming D when encrypting, and D becoming A when decrypting) to protect messages of military significance. While Caesar's was the first recorded use of this scheme, other substitution ciphers are known to have been used earlier.

"If he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in cipher, that is, by so changing the order of the letters of the alphabet, that not a word could be made out. If anyone wishes to decipher these, and get at their meaning, he must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D, for A, and so with the others."

His nephew, Augustus, also used the cipher, but with a right shift of one, and it did not wrap around to the beginning of the alphabet:

"Whenever he wrote in cipher, he wrote B for A, C for B, and the rest of the letters on the same principle, using AA for Z."

Evidence exists that Julius Caesar also used more complicated systems, and one writer, Aulus Gellius, refers to a (now lost) treatise on his ciphers:

"There is even a rather ingeniously written treatise by the grammarian Probus concerning the secret meaning of letters in the composition of Caesar's epistles."

It is unknown how effective the Caesar cipher was at the time; there is no record at that time of any techniques for the solution of simple substitution ciphers. The earliest surviving records date to the 9th-century works of Al-Kindi in the Arab world with the discovery of frequency analysis.

A piece of text encrypted in a Hebrew version of the Caesar cipher is sometimes found on the back of Jewish mezuzah scrolls. When each letter is replaced with the letter before it in the Hebrew alphabet the text translates as " YHWH, our God, YHWH", a quotation from the main part of the scroll.

In the 19th century, the personal advertisements section in newspapers would sometimes be used to exchange messages encrypted using simple cipher schemes. Kahn (1967) describes instances of lovers engaging in secret communications enciphered using the Caesar cipher in . Even as late as 1915, the Caesar cipher was in use: the Russian army employed it as a replacement for more complicated ciphers which had proved to be too difficult for their troops to master; German and Austrian cryptanalysts had little difficulty in decrypting their messages.

A construction of two rotating disks with a Caesar cipher can be used to encrypt or decrypt the code.

Caesar ciphers can be found today in children's toys such as secret decoder rings. A Caesar shift of thirteen is also performed in the ROT13 algorithm, a simple method of obfuscating text widely found on Usenet and used to obscure text (such as joke punchlines and story spoilers), but not seriously used as a method of encryption.

The Vigenère cipher uses a Caesar cipher with a different shift at each position in the text; the value of the shift is defined using a repeating keyword. If the keyword is as long as the message, is chosen at random, never becomes known to anyone else, and is never reused, this is the one-time pad cipher, proven unbreakable. However the problems involved in using a random key as long as the message make the one-time pad difficult to use in practice. Keywords shorter than the message (e.g., " Complete Victory" used by the Confederacy during the American Civil War), introduce a cyclic pattern that might be detected with a statistically advanced version of frequency analysis.

In April 2006, fugitive Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured in Sicily partly because some of his messages, clumsily written in a variation of the Caesar cipher, were broken. Provenzano's cipher used numbers, so that "A" would be written as "4", "B" as "5", and so on.

In 2011, Rajib Karim was convicted in the United Kingdom of "terrorism offences" after using the Caesar cipher to communicate with Bangladeshi Islamic activists discussing plots to blow up British Airways planes or disrupt their IT networks. Although the parties had access to far better encryption techniques (Karim himself used PGP for data storage on computer disks), they chose to use their own scheme (implemented in Microsoft Excel), rejecting a more sophisticated code program called Mujahedeen Secrets "because 'kaffirs', or non-believers, know about it, so it must be less secure".

The Caesar cipher can be easily broken even in a ciphertext-only scenario. Since there are only a limited number of possible shifts (25 in English), an attacker can mount a brute force attack by deciphering the message, or part of it, using each possible shift. The correct description will be the one which makes sense as English text. An example is shown on the right for the ciphertext "exxegoexsrgi"; the candidate plaintext for shift four "attackatonce" is the only one which makes sense as English text. Another type of brute force attack is to write out the alphabet beneath each letter of the ciphertext, starting at that letter. Again the correct decryption is the one which makes sense as English text. This technique is sometimes known as "completing the plain component".

The distribution of letters in a typical sample of English language text has a distinctive and predictable shape. A Caesar shift "rotates" this distribution, and it is possible to determine the shift by examining the resultant frequency graph.

Another approach is to match up the frequency distribution of the letters. By graphing the frequencies of letters in the ciphertext, and by knowing the expected distribution of those letters in the original language of the plaintext, a human can easily spot the value of the shift by looking at the displacement of particular features of the graph. This is known as frequency analysis. For example, in the English language the plaintext frequencies of the letters E, T, (usually most frequent), and Q, Z (typically least frequent) are particularly distinctive. Computers can also do this by measuring how well the actual frequency distribution matches up with the expected distribution; for example, the chi-squared statistic can be used.

The unicity distance for the Caesar cipher is about 2, meaning that on average at least two characters of ciphertext are required to determine the key. In rare cases more text may be needed. For example the words "river" and "arena" can be converted to each other with a Caesar shift, which means they can produce the same ciphertext with different shifts. However in practice the key can almost certainly be found with at least 6 characters of ciphertext.

With the Caesar cipher, encrypting a text multiple times provides no additional security. This is because two encryptions of, say, shift A and shift B, will be equivalent to a single encryption with shift . In mathematical terms, the set of encryption operations under each possible key forms a group under composition.

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In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_Crown

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Gaius Julius Caesar (, SEE-zər; Latin: [ˈɡaːiʊsˈjuːliʊsˈkae̯sar]; 12 July 100 BC - 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and subsequently became dictator from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. He played a critical role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.

In 60 BC, Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey formed the First Triumvirate, an informal political alliance that dominated Roman politics for several years. Their attempts to amass political power were opposed by many in the Senate, among them Cato the Younger with the private support of Cicero. Caesar rose to become one of the most powerful politicians in the Roman Republic through a string of military victories in the Gallic Wars, completed by 51 BC, which greatly extended Roman territory. During this time he both invaded Britain and built a bridge across the river Rhine. These achievements and the support of his veteran army threatened to eclipse the standing of Pompey, who had realigned himself with the Senate after the death of Crassus in 53 BC. With the Gallic Wars concluded, the Senate ordered Caesar to step down from his military command and return to Rome. In 49 BC, Caesar openly defied the Senate's authority by crossing the Rubicon and marching towards Rome at the head of an army. This began Caesar's civil war, which he won, leaving him in a position of near-unchallenged power and influence in 45 BC.

After assuming control of government, Caesar began a programme of social and governmental reform, including the creation of the Julian calendar. He gave citizenship to many residents of far regions of the Roman Republic. He initiated land reforms to support his veterans and initiated an enormous building programme. In early 44 he was proclaimed "dictator for life" (dictator perpetuo). Fearful of his power and domination of the state, a group of senators led by Brutus and Cassius assassinated Caesar on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BC. A new series of civil wars broke out and the constitutional government of the Republic was never fully restored. Caesar's great-nephew and adopted heir Octavian, later known as Augustus, rose to sole power after defeating his opponents in the last civil war of the Roman Republic. Octavian set about solidifying his power, and the era of the Roman Empire began.

Caesar was an accomplished author and historian as well as a statesman; much of his life is known from his own accounts of his military campaigns. Other contemporary sources include the letters and speeches of Cicero and the historical writings of Sallust. Later biographies of Caesar by Suetonius and Plutarch are also important sources. Caesar is considered by many historians to be one of the greatest military commanders in history. His cognomen was subsequently adopted as a synonym for " Emperor"; the title " Caesar" was used throughout the Roman Empire, giving rise to modern descendants such as Kaiser and Tsar. He has frequently appeared in literary and artistic works.

Early life and career

Gaius Julius Caesar was born into a patrician family, the gens Julia on 12 July 100 BC. The family claimed to have immigrated to Rome from Alba Longa during the seventh century BC after the third king of Rome, Tullus Hostilius, took and destroyed their city. The family also claimed descent from Julus, the son of Aeneas and founder of Alba Longa. Given that Aeneas was a son of Venus, this made the clan divine. This genealogy had not yet taken its final form by the first century, but the clan's claimed descent from Venus was well established in public consciousness. There is no evidence that Caesar himself was born by Caesarian section; such operations entailed the death of the mother, but Caesar's mother lived for decades after his birth and no ancient sources record any difficulty with the birth.

Despite their ancient pedigree, the Julii Caesares were not especially politically influential during the middle republic. The first person known to have had the cognomen Caesar was a praetor in 208 BC during the Second Punic War. The family's first consul was in 157 BC, though their political fortunes had recovered in the early first century, producing two consuls in 91 and 90 BC. Caesar's homonymous father was moderately successful politically. He married Aurelia, a member of the politically influential Aurelii Cottae, producing - along with Caesar - two daughters. Buoyed by his own marriage and his sister's marriage (the dictator's aunt) with the extremely influential Gaius Marius, he also served on the Saturninian land commission in 103 BC and was elected praetor some time between 92 and 85 BC; he served as proconsular governor of Asia for two years, likely 91-90 BC.

Life under Sulla and military service

Caesar's father did not seek a consulship during the domination of Lucius Cornelius Cinna and instead chose retirement. During Cinna's dominance, Caesar was named as flamen Dialis (a priest of Jupiter) which led to his marriage to Cinna's daughter, Cornelia. The religious taboos of the priesthood would have forced Caesar to forego a political career; the appointment - one of the highest non-political honours - indicates that there were few expectations of a major career for Caesar. In early 84 BC, Caesar's father died suddenly. After Sulla's victory in the civil war (82 BC), Cinna's acta were annulled. Sulla consequently ordered Caesar to abdicate and divorce Cinna's daughter. Caesar refused, implicitly questioning the legitimacy of Sulla's annulment. Sulla may have put Caesar on the proscription lists, though scholars are mixed. Caesar then went into hiding before his relatives and contacts among the Vestal Virgins were able to intercede on his behalf. They then reached a compromise where Caesar would resign his priesthood but keep his wife and chattels; Sulla's alleged remark he saw "in [Caesar] many Mariuses" is apocryphal.

Bust, from the imperial period, of a man - in this case Augustus - wearing the civic crown (Latin: corona civica). Caesar won the civic crown for his bravery at the Siege of Mytilene in 81 BC.

Caesar then left Italy to serve in the staff of the governor of Asia, Marcus Minucius Thermus. While there, he travelled to Bithynia to collect naval reinforcements and stayed some time as a guest of the king, Nicomedes IV, though later invective connected Caesar to a homosexual relation with the monarch. He then served at the Siege of Mytilene where he won the civic crown for saving the life of a fellow citizen in battle. The privileges of the crown - the Senate was supposed to stand on a holder's entrance and holders were permitted to wear the crown at public occasions - whetted Caesar's appetite for honours. After the capture of Mytilene, Caesar transferred to the staff of Publius Servilius Vatia in Cilicia before learning of Sulla's death in 78 BC and returning home immediately. He was alleged to have wanted to join in on the consul Lepidus' revolt that year but this is likely literary embellishment of Caesar's desire for tyranny from a young age.

Afterward, Caesar attacked some of the Sullan aristocracy in the courts but was unsuccessful in his attempted prosecution of Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella in 77 BC, who had recently returned from a proconsulship in Macedonia. Going after a less well-connected senator, he was successful the next year in prosecuting Gaius Antonius Hybrida (later consul in 63 BC) for profiteering from the proscriptions but was forestalled when a tribune interceded on Antonius' behalf. After these oratorical attempts, Caesar left Rome for Rhodes seeking the tutelage of the rhetorician Apollonius Molon. While travelling, he was intercepted and ransomed by pirates in a story that was later much embellished. According to Plutarch and Suetonius, he was freed after paying a ransom of fifty talents and responded by returning with a fleet to capture and execute the pirates. The recorded sum for the ransom is literary embellishment and it is more likely that the pirates were sold into slavery per Velleius Paterculus. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Third Mithridatic War over the winter of 75 and 74 BC; Caesar is alleged to have gone around collecting troops in the province at the locals' expense and leading them successfully against Mithridates' forces.

Entrance to politics

While absent from Rome, in 73 BC, Caesar was co-opted into the pontifices in place of his deceased relative Gaius Aurelius Cotta. The promotion marked him as a well-accepted member of the aristocracy with great future prospects in his political career. Caesar decided to return shortly thereafter and on his return was elected one of the military tribunes for 71 BC. There is no evidence that Caesar served in war - even though the war on Spartacus was on-going - during his term; he did, however, agitate for the removal of Sulla's disabilities on the plebeian tribunate and for those who supported Lepidus' revolt to be pardoned. These advocacies were common and uncontroversial. The next year, 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus were consuls and brought legislation restoring the plebeian tribunate's rights; one of the tribunes, with Caesar supporting, then brought legislation pardoning the Lepidan exiles.

For his quaestorship in 69 BC, Caesar was allotted to serve under Gaius Antistius Vetus in Hispania Ulterior. His election also gave him a lifetime seat in the Senate. However, before he left, his aunt Julia, the widow of Marius died and, soon afterwards, his wife Cornelia died shortly after bearing his only legitimate child, Julia. He gave eulogies for both at public funerals. During Julia's funeral, Caesar displayed the images of his aunt's husband Marius, whose memory had been suppressed after Sulla's victory in the civil war. Some of the Sullan nobles - including Quintus Lutatius Catulus - who had suffered under the Marian regime objected, but by this point depictions of husbands in aristocratic women's funerary processions was common. Contra Plutarch, Caesar's action here was likely in keeping with a political trend for reconciliation and normalisation rather than a display of renewed factionalism. Caesar quickly remarried, taking the hand of Sulla's granddaughter Pompeia.

Aedileship and election as pontifex maximus

For much of this period, Caesar was one of Pompey's supporters. Caesar joined with Pompey in the late 70s to support restoration of tribunician rights; his support for the law recalling the Lepidan exiles may have been related to the same tribune's bill to grant lands to Pompey's veterans. Caesar also supported the lex Gabinia in 67 BC granting Pompey an extraordinary command against piracy in the Mediterranean and also supported the lex Manilia in 66 BC to reassign the Third Mithridatic War from its then-commander Lucullus to Pompey.

Four years after his aunt Julia's funeral, in 65 BC, Caesar served as curule aedile and staged lavish games that won him further attention and popular support. He also restored the trophies won by Marius, and taken down by Sulla, over Jugurtha and the Cimbri. According to Plutarch's narrative, the trophies were restored overnight to the applause and tears of joy of the onlookers; any sudden and secret restoration of this sort would not have been possible - architects, restorers, and other workmen would have to have been hired and paid for - nor would it have been likely that the work could have been done in a single night. It is more likely that Caesar was merely restoring his family's public monuments - consistent with standard aristocratic practice and the virtue of pietas - and, over objections from Catulus, these actions were broadly supported by the Senate.

In 63 BC, Caesar stood for the praetorship and also for the post of pontifex maximus, who was the head of the College of Pontiffs and the highest ranking state religious official. In the pontifical election before the tribes, Caesar faced two influential senators: Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Publius Servilius Isauricus. Caesar came out victorious. Many scholars have expressed astonishment that Caesar's candidacy was taken seriously, but this was not without historical precedent. Ancient sources allege that Caesar paid huge bribes or was shamelessly ingratiating; that no charge was ever laid alleging this implies that bribery alone is insufficient to explain his victory. If bribes or other monies were needed, they may have been underwritten by Pompey, whom Caesar at this time supported and who opposed Catulus' candidacy.

Many sources also assert that Caesar supported the land reform proposals brought that year by plebeian tribune Publius Servilius Rullus, however, there are no ancient sources so attesting. Caesar also engaged in a collateral manner in the trial of Gaius Rabirius by one of the plebeian tribunes - Titus Labienus - for the murder of Saturninus in accordance with a senatus consultum ultimum some forty years earlier. The most famous event of the year was the Catilinarian conspiracy. While some of Caesar's enemies, including Catulus, alleged that he participated in the conspiracy, the chance that he was a participant is extremely small.

Praetorship

Caesar won his election to the praetorship in 63 BC easily and, as one of the praetor-elects, spoke out that December in the Senate against executing certain citizens who had been arrested in the city conspiring with Gauls in furtherance of the conspiracy. Caesar's proposal at the time is not entirely clear. The earlier sources assert that he advocated life imprisonment without trial; the later sources assert he instead wanted the conspirators imprisoned pending trial. Most accounts agree that Caesar supported confiscation of the conspirators' property. Caesar likely advocated the former, which was a compromise position that would place the Senate within the bounds of the lex Sempronia de capite civis, and was initially successful in swaying the body; a later intervention by Cato, however, swayed the Senate at the end for execution.

During his year as praetor, Caesar first attempted to deprive his enemy Catulus of the honour of completing the rebuilt Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, accusing him of embezzling funds, and threatening to bring legislation to reassign it to Pompey. This proposal was quickly dropped amid near-universal opposition. He then supported the attempt by plebeian tribune Metellus Nepos to transfer the command against Catiline from the consul of 63, Gaius Antonius Hybrida, to Pompey. After a violent meeting of the comitia tributa in the forum, where Metellus came into fisticuffs with his tribunician colleagues Cato and Quintus Minucius Thermus, the Senate passed a decree against Metellus - Suetonius claims that both Nepos and Caesar were deposed from their magistracies; this would have been a constitutional impossibility - which led Caesar to distance himself from the proposals: hopes for a provincial command and need to repair relations with the aristocracy took priority. He also was engaged in the Bona Dea affair, where Publius Clodius Pulcher snuck into Caesar's house sacrilegiously during a female religious observance; Caesar avoided any part of the affair by divorcing his wife immediately - claiming that his wife needed to be "above suspicion" - but there is no indication that Caesar supported Clodius in any way.

Bronze bust of Cato, Caesar's principal opponent in the Catilinarian debate and also a personal enemy. Cato may have been responsible for the law requiring declarations of candidacy in person within the pomerium.

After his praetorship, Caesar was appointed to govern Hispania Ulterior pro consule. Deeply indebted from his campaigns for the praetorship and for the pontificate, Caesar required military victory beyond the normal provincial extortion to pay them off. He campaigned against the Callaeci and Lusitani and seized the Callaeci capital in northwestern Spain, bringing Roman troops to the Atlantic and seizing enough plunder to pay his debts. Claiming to have completed the peninsula's conquest, he made for home after having been hailed imperator. When he arrived home in the summer of 60 BC, he was then forced to choose between a triumph and election to the consulship: either he could remain outside the pomerium (Rome's sacred boundary) awaiting a triumph or cross the boundary, giving up his command and triumph, to make a declaration of consular candidacy. Attempts to waive the requirement for the declaration to be made in person were filibustered in the Senate by Caesar's enemy Cato, even though the Senate seemed to support the exception. Faced with the choice between a triumph and the consulship, Caesar chose the consulship.

First consulship and the Gallic wars

Caesar stood for the consulship of 59 BC along with two other candidates. His political position at the time was strong: he had supporters among the families which had supported Marius or Cinna; his connection with the Sullan aristocracy was good; his support of Pompey had won him support in turn. His support for reconciliation in continuing aftershocks of the civil war was popular in all parts of society. With the support of Crassus, who supported Caesar's joint ticket with one Lucius Lucceius, Caesar won. Lucceius, however, did not and the voters returned Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus instead, one of Caesar's long-standing personal and political enemies.

First consulship

After the elections, Caesar reconciled Pompey and Crassus, two political foes, in a three-way alliance misleadingly termed the "First Triumvirate" in modern times. Caesar was still at work in December of 60 BC attempting to find allies for his consulship and the alliance was finalised only some time around its start. Pompey and Crassus joined in pursuit of two respective goals: the ratification of Pompey's eastern settlement and the bailing out of tax farmers in Asia, many of whom were Crassus' clients. All three sought the extended patronage of land grants, with Pompey especially seeking the promised land grants for his veterans.

Caesar's first act was to publish the minutes of the Senate and the assemblies, signalling the Senate's accountability to the public. He then brought in the Senate a bill - crafted to avoid objections to previous land reform proposals and any indications of radicalism - to purchase property from willing sellers to distribute to Pompey's veterans and the urban poor. It would be administered by a board of twenty (with Caesar excluded), and financed by Pompey's plunder and territorial gains. Referring it to the Senate in hope that it would take up the matter to show its beneficence for the people, there was little opposition and the obstructionism that occurred was largely unprincipled, firmly opposing it not on grounds of public interest but rather opposition to Caesar's political advancement. Unable to overcome Cato's filibustering, he moved the bill before the people and, at a public meeting, Caesar's co-consul Bibulus threatened a permanent veto for the entire year. This clearly violated the people's well-established legislative sovereignty and triggered a riot in which Bibulus' fasces were broken, symbolising popular rejection of his magistracy. The bill was then voted through. Bibulus attempted to induce the Senate to nullify it on grounds it was passed by violence and contrary to the auspices but the Senate refused.

Caesar also brought and passed a one-third write-down of tax farmers' arrears for Crassus and ratification of Pompey's eastern settlements. Both bills were passed with little or no debate in the Senate. Caesar then moved to extend his agrarian bill to Campania some time in May; this may be when Bibulus withdrew to his house. Pompey, shortly thereafter, also wed Caesar's daughter Julia to seal their alliance. An ally of Caesar's, plebeian tribune Publius Vatinius moved the lex Vatinia assigning the provinces of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul to Caesar for five years. Suetonius' claim that the Senate had assigned to Caesar the silvae callesque ("woods and tracks") is likely an exaggeration: fear of Gallic invasion had grown in 60 BC and it is more likely that the consuls had been assigned to Italy, a defensive posture that Caesarian partisans dismissed as "mere 'forest tracks'". The Senate was also persuaded to assign to Caesar Transalpine Gaul as well, subject to annual renewal, most likely to control his ability to make war on the far side of the Alps.

Some time in the year, perhaps after the passing of the bill distributing the Campanian land and after these political defeats, Bibulus withdrew to his house. There, he issued edicts in absentia, purporting unprecedentedly to cancel all days on which Caesar or his allies could hold votes for religious reasons. Cato too attempted symbolic gestures against Caesar, which allowed him and his allies to "feign victimisation"; these tactics were successful in building revulsion to Caesar and his allies through the year. This opposition caused serious political difficulties to Caesar and his allies, belying the common depiction of triumviral political supremacy. Later in the year, however, Caesar - with the support of his opponents - brought and passed the lex Julia de repetundis to crack down on provincial corruption. When his consulship ended, Caesar's legislation was challenged by two of the new praetors but discussion in the Senate stalled and was regardless dropped. He stayed near the city until some time around mid-March.

Caesar in Gaul

The extent of the Roman Republic in 40 BC after Caesar's conquests

During the Gallic Wars, Caesar wrote his Commentaries thereon, which were acknowledged even in his time as a Latin literary masterwork. Meant to document Caesar's campaigns in his own words and maintain support in Rome for his military operations and career, he produced some ten volumes covering operations in Gaul from 58 to 52 BC. Each was likely produced in the year following the events described and was likely aimed at the general, or at least literate, population in Rome; the account is naturally partial to Caesar - his defeats are excused and victories highlighted - but it is almost the sole source for events in Gaul in this period.

Gaul in 58 BC was in the midst of some instability. Tribes had raided into Transalpine Gaul and there was an on-going struggle between two tribes in central Gaul which collaterally involved Roman alliances and politics. The divisions within the Gauls - they were no unified bloc - would be exploited in the coming years. The first engagement was in April 58 BC when Caesar prevented the migrating Helvetii from moving through Roman territory, allegedly because he feared they would unseat a Roman ally. Building a wall, he stopped their movement near Geneva and - after raising two legions - defeated them at the Battle of Bibracte before forcing them to return to their original homes. He was drawn further north responding to requests from Gallic tribes, including the Aedui, for aid against Ariovistus - king of the Suebi and a declared friend of Rome by the Senate during Caesar's own consulship - and he defeated them at the Battle of Vosges. Wintering in northeastern Gaul near the Belgae in the winter of 58-57, Caesar's forward military position triggered an uprising to remove his troops; able to eke out a victory at the Battle of the Sabis, Caesar spent much of 56 BC suppressing the Belgae and dispersing his troops to campaign across much of Gaul, including against the Veneti in what is now Brittany. At this point, almost all of Gaul - except its central regions - fell under Roman subjugation.

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar, painting by Lionel Royer in 1899. Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en-Velay, France.

Seeking to buttress his military reputation, he engaged Germans attempting to cross the Rhine, which marked it as a Roman frontier; displaying Roman engineering prowess, he here built a bridge across the Rhine in a feat of engineering meant to show Rome's ability to project power. Ostensibly seeking to interdict British aid to his Gallic enemies, he led expeditions into southern Britain in 55 and 54 BC, perhaps seeking further conquests or otherwise wanting to impress readers in Rome; Britain at the time was to the Romans an "island of mystery" and "a land of wonder". He, however, withdrew from the island in the face of winter uprisings in Gaul led by the Eburones and Belgae starting in late 54 BC which ambushed and virtually annihilated a legion and five cohorts. Caesar was, however, able to lure the rebels into unfavourable terrain and routed them in battle. The next year, a greater challenge emerged with the uprising of most of central Gaul, led by Vercingetorix of the Averni. Caesar was initially defeated at Gergovia before besieging Vercingetorix at Alesia. After becoming himself besieged, Caesar won a major victory which forced Vercingetorix's surrender; Caesar then spent much of his time into 51 BC suppressing any remaining resistance.

Politics, Gaul, and Rome

In the initial years from the end of Caesar's consulship in 59 BC, the three so-called triumvirs sought to maintain the goodwill of the extremely popular Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was plebeian tribune in 58 BC and in that year successfully sent Cicero into exile. When Clodius took an anti-Pompeian stance later that year, he unsettled Pompey's eastern arrangements, started attacking the validity of Caesar's consular legislation, and by August 58 forced Pompey into seclusion. Caesar and Pompey responded by successfully backing the election of magistrates to recall Cicero from exile on the condition that Cicero would refrain from criticism or obstruction of the allies.

Politics in Rome falling into violent street clashes between Clodius and two tribunes who were friends of Cicero. With Cicero now supporting the Caesar and Pompey, Caesar sent news of Gaul to Rome and claimed total victory and pacification. The Senate at Cicero's motion voted him an unprecedented fifteen days of thanksgiving. Such reports were necessary for Caesar, especially in light of senatorial opponents, to prevent the Senate from reassigning his command in Transalpine Gaul, even if his position in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum was guaranteed by the lex Vatinia until 54 BC. His success was evidently recognised when the Senate voted state funds for some of Caesar's legions, which until this time Caesar had paid for personally.

The three allies' relations broke down in 57 BC: one of Pompey's allies challenged Caesar's land reform bill and the allies had a poor showing in the elections that year. With a real threat to Caesar's command and acta brewing in 56 BC under the aegis of the unfriendly consuls, Caesar needed his allies' political support. Pompey and Crassus too wanted military commands. Their combined interests led to a renewal of the alliance; drawing in the support of Appius Claudius Pulcher and his younger brother Clodius for the consulship of 54 BC, they planned second consulships with following governorships in 55 BC for both Pompey and Crassus. Caesar, for his part, would receive a five-year extension of command.

Cicero was induced to oppose reassignment of Caesar's provinces and to defend a number of the allies' clients; his gloomy predictions of a triumviral set of consuls-designate for years on end proved an exaggeration when, only by desperate tactics, bribery, intimidation and violence were Pompey and Crassus elected consuls for 55 BC. During their consulship, Pompey and Crassus passed - with some tribunician support - the lex Pompeia Licinia extending Caesar's command and the lex Trebonia giving them respective commands in Spain and Syria, though Pompey never left for the province and remained politically active at Rome. The opposition again unified against their heavy-handed political tactics - though not against Caesar's activities in Gaul - and defeated the allies in the elections of that year.

The ambush and destruction in Gaul of a legion and five cohorts in the winter of 55-54 BC produced substantial concern in Rome about Caesar's command and competence, evidenced by the highly defensive narrative in Caesar's Commentaries. The death of Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife Julia in childbirth c. late August 54 did not create a rift between Caesar and Pompey. At the start of 53 BC, Caesar sought and received reinforcements by recruitment and a private deal with Pompey before two years of largely unsuccessful campaigning against Gallic insurgents. In the same year, Crassus's campaign ended in disaster at the Battle of Carrhae, culminating in his death at the hands of the Parthians. When in 52 BC Pompey started the year with a sole consulship to restore order to the city, Caesar was in Gaul suppressing insurgencies; after news of his victory at Alesia, with the support of Pompey he received twenty days of thanksgiving and, pursuant to the "Law of the Ten Tribunes", the right to stand for the consulship in absentia.

From the period 52 to 49 BC, trust between Caesar and Pompey disintegrated. In 51 BC, the consul Marcellus proposed recalling Caesar, arguing that his provincia (here meaning "task") in Gaul - due to his victory against Vercingetorix in 52 - was complete; it evidently was incomplete as Caesar was that year fighting the Bellovaci and regardless the proposal was vetoed. That year, it seemed that the conservatives around Cato in the Senate would seek to enlist Pompey to force Caesar to return from Gaul without honours or a second consulship. Cato, Bibulus, and their allies, however, were successful in winning Pompey over to take a hard line against Caesar's continued command.

As 50 BC progressed, fears of civil war grew; both Caesar and his opponents started building up troops in southern Gaul and northern Italy, respectively. In the autumn, Cicero and others sought disarmament by both Caesar and Pompey, and on 1 December 50 BC this was formally proposed in the Senate. It received overwhelming support - 370 to 22 - but was not passed when one of the consuls dissolved the meeting. That year, when a rumour came to Rome that Caesar was marching into Italy, both consuls instructed Pompey to defend Italy, a charge he accepted as a last resort. At the start of 49 BC, Caesar's renewed offer that he and Pompey disarm was read to the Senate and was rejected by the hardliners. A later compromise given privately to Pompey was also rejected at their insistence. On 7 January, his supportive tribunes were driven from Rome; the Senate then declared Caesar an enemy and it issued its senatus consultum ultimum.

There is scholarly disagreement as to the specific reasons why Caesar marched on Rome. A very popular theory is that Caesar was forced to choose - when denied the immunity of his proconsular tenure - between prosecution, conviction, and exile or civil war in defence of his position. Whether Caesar actually would have been prosecuted and convicted is debated. Some scholars believe the possibility of successful prosecution was extremely unlikely. Caesar's main objectives were to secure a second consulship - first mooted in 52 as colleague to Pompey's sole consulship - and a triumph. He feared that his opponents - then holding both consulships for 50 BC - would reject his candidacy or refuse to ratify an election he won. This also was the core of his war justification: that Pompey and his allies were planning, by force if necessary (indicated in the expulsion of the tribunes), to suppress the liberty of the Roman people to elect Caesar and honour his accomplishments.

Italy, Spain, and Greece

Around 10 or 11 January 49 BC, in response to the Senate's "final decree", Caesar crossed the Rubicon - the river defining the northern boundary of Italy - with a single legion, the Legio XIII Gemina, and ignited civil war. Upon crossing the Rubicon, Caesar, according to Plutarch and Suetonius, is supposed to have quoted the Athenian playwright Menander, in Greek, " let the die be cast". Pompey and many senators fled south, believing that Caesar was marching quickly for Rome. Caesar, after capturing communication routes to Rome, paused and opened negotiations, but they fell apart amid mutual distrust. Caesar responded by advancing south, seeking to capture Pompey to force a conference.

Pompey withdrew to Brundisium and was able to escape to Greece, abandoning Italy in face of Caesar's superior forces and evading Caesar's pursuit. Caesar stayed near Rome for about two weeks - during his stay his forceful seizure of the treasury over tribunician veto put the lie to his pro-tribunician war justifications - and left Lepidus in charge of Italy while he attacked Pompey's Spanish provinces. He defeated two of Pompey's legates at the Battle of Ilerda before forcing surrender of the third; his legates moved into Sicily and into Africa, though the African expedition failed. Returning to Rome in the autumn, Caesar had Lepidus, as praetor, bring a law appointing Caesar dictator to conduct the elections; he, along with Publius Servilius Isauricus, won the following elections and would serve as consuls for 48 BC. Resigning the dictatorship after eleven days, Caesar then left Italy for Greece to stop Pompey's preparations, arriving in force in early 48 BC.

Caesar besieged Pompey at Dyrrhachium, but Pompey was able to break out and force Caesar's forces to flee. Following Pompey southeast into Greece and to save one of his legates, he engaged and decisively defeated Pompey at Pharsalus on 9 August 48 BC. Pompey then fled for Egypt; Cato fled for Africa; others, like Cicero and Marcus Junius Brutus, begged for Caesar's pardon.

Alexandrine war and Asia Minor

Cleopatra and Caesar, 1866 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme

This mid-1st-century-BC Roman wall painting in Pompeii is probably a depiction of Cleopatra VII as Venus Genetrix, with her son Caesarion as Cupid. Its owner Marcus Fabius Rufus most likely ordered its concealment behind a wall in reaction to the execution of Caesarion on orders of Octavian in 30 BC.[165][166]

Pompey was killed when he arrived in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt. Caesar arrived three days later on 2 October 48 BC. Prevented from leaving the city by Etesian winds, Caesar decided to arbitrate an Egyptian civil war between the child pharaoh Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator and Cleopatra, his sister, wife, and co-regent queen. In late October 48 BC, Caesar was appointed in absentia to a year-long dictatorship, after news of his victory at Pharsalus arrived to Rome. While in Alexandria, he started an affair with Cleopatra and withstood a siege by Ptolemy and his other sister Arsinoe until March 47 BC. Reinforced by eastern client allies under Mithridates of Pergamum, he then defeated Ptolemy at the Battle of the Nile and installed Cleopatra as ruler. Caesar and Cleopatra celebrated the victory with a triumphal procession on the Nile. He stayed in Egypt with Cleopatra until June or July that year, though the relevant commentaries attributed to him give no such impression. Some time in late June, Cleopatra gave birth to a child by Caesar, called Caesarion.

When Caesar landed at Antioch, he learnt that during his time in Egypt, the king of what is now Crimea, Pharnaces, had attempted to seize what had been his father's kingdom, Pontus, across the Black Sea in northern Anatolia. His invasion had swept aside Caesar's legates and the local client kings, but Caesar engaged him at Zela and defeated him immediately, leading Caesar to write veni, vidi, vici ("I came, I saw, I conquered"), downplaying Pompey's previous Pontic victories. He then left quickly for Italy.

Italy, Africa, and Spain

Caesar's absence from Italy put Mark Antony, as magister equitum, in charge. His rule was unpopular: Publius Cornelius Dolabella, serving as plebeian tribune in 47 BC, agitated for debt relief and after that agitation got out of hand the Senate moved for Antony to restore order. Delayed by a mutiny in southern Italy, he returned and suppressed the riots by force, killing many and delivering a similar blow to his popularity. Cato had marched to Africa and there Metellus Scipio was in charge of the remaining republicans; they allied with Juba of Numidia; what used to be Pompey's fleet also raided the central Mediterranean islands. Caesar's governor in Spain, moreover, was sufficiently unpopular that the province revolted and switched to the republican side.

Caesar demoted Antony on his return and pacified the mutineers without violence before overseeing the election of the rest of the magistrates for 47 BC - no elections had yet been held - and also for those of 46 BC. Caesar would serve with Lepidus as consul in 46; he borrowed money for the war, confiscated and sold the property of his enemies at fair prices, and then left for Africa on 25 December 47 BC. Caesar's landing in Africa was marked with some difficulties establishing a beachhead and logistically. He was defeated by Titus Labienus at Ruspina on 4 January 46 BC and thereafter took a rather cautious approach. After inducing some desertions from the republicans, Caesar ended up surrounded at Thapsus. His troops attacked prematurely on 6 April 46 BC, starting a battle; they then won it and massacred the republican forces without quarter. Marching on Utica, where Cato commanded, Caesar arrived to find that Cato had killed himself rather than receive Caesar's clemency. Many of the remaining anti-Caesarian leaders, including Metellus Scipio and Juba, also committed suicide shortly thereafter. Labienus and two of Pompey's sons, however, had moved to the Spanish provinces in revolt. Caesar started a process of annexing parts of Numidia and then returned to Italy via Sardinia in June 46 BC.

Caesar stayed in Italy to celebrate four triumphs in late September, supposedly over four foreign enemies: Gaul, Egypt, Pharnaces (Asia), and Juba (Africa). He led Vercingetorix, Cleopatra's younger sister Arsinoe, and Juba's son before his chariot; Vercingetorix was executed. According to Appian, in some of the triumphs, Caesar paraded pictures and models of his victories over fellow Romans in the civil wars, to popular dismay. The soldiers were each given 24,000 sesterces (a lifetime's worth of pay); further games and celebrations were put on for the plebs. Near the end of the year, Caesar heard bad news from Spain and, with an army, left for the peninsula, leaving Lepidus in charge as magister equitum.

At a bloody battle at Munda on 17 March 45 BC, Caesar narrowly found victory; his enemies were treated as rebels and he had them massacred. Labienus died on the field. While one of Pompey's sons, Sextus, escaped, the war was effectively over. Caesar remained in the province until June before setting out for Rome, arriving in October of the same year, and celebrated an unseemly triumph over fellow Romans. By this point he had started preparations for war on the Parthians to avenge Crassus' death at Carrhae in 53 BC, with wide-ranging objectives that would take him into Dacia for three or more years. It was set to start on 18 March 44 BC.

Assassination

Dictatorships and honours

Prior to Caesar's assumption of the title dictator perpetuo in February 44 BC, he had been appointed dictator some four times since his first dictatorship in 49 BC. After occupying Rome, he engineered this first appointment, largely to hold elections; after 11 days he resigned. The other dictatorships lasted for longer periods, up to a year, and by April 46 BC he was given a new dictatorship annually. The task he was assigned revived that of Sulla's dictatorship: rei publicae constituendae. These appointments, however, were not the source of legal power themselves; in the eyes of the literary sources, they were instead honours and titles which reflected Caesar's dominant position in the state, secured not by extraordinary magistracy or legal powers, but by personal status as victor over other Romans.

Through the period after Pharsalus, the Senate showered Caesar with honours, including the title praefectus moribus ( lit. 'prefect of morals') which historically was associated with the censorial power to revise the Senate rolls. He was also granted power over war and peace, usurping a power traditionally held by the comitia centuriata. These powers attached to Caesar personally. Similarly extraordinary were a number of symbolic honours which saw Caesar's image put onto Roman coinage - the first for a living Roman - with special rights to wear royal dress, sit atop a golden chair in the Senate, and have his statues erected in public temples. The month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed Julius (now July). These were symbols of divine monarchy and, later, objects of resentment.

The decisions on the normal operation of the state - justice, legislation, administration, and public works - were concentrated into Caesar's person without regard for or even notice given to the traditional institutions of the republic. Caesar's domination over public affairs and his competitive instinct to preclude all others alienated the political class and led eventually to the conspiracy against his life.

Legislation

Caesar, as far as is attested in evidence, did not intend to restructure Roman society. Ernst Badian, writing in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, noted that although Caesar did implement a series of reforms, they did not touch on the core of the republican system: he "had no plans for basic social and constitutional reform" and that "the extraordinary honours heaped upon him... merely grafted him as an ill-fitting head on to the body of the traditional structure".

The most important of Caesar's reforms was to the calendar, which saw the abolition of the traditional republican lunisolar calendar and its replacement with a solar calendar now called the Julian calendar. He also increased the number of magistrates and senators (from 600 to 900) to better administer the empire and reward his supporters with offices. Colonies also were founded outside Italy - notably on the sites of Carthage and Corinth, which had both been destroyed during Rome's 2nd century BC conquests - to discharge Italy's population into the provinces and reduce unrest. The royal power of naming patricians was revived to benefit the families of his men and the permanent courts jury pools were also altered to remove the tribuni aerarii, leaving only the equestrians and senators.

He also took further administrative actions to stabilise his rule and that of the state. Caesar reduced the size of the grain dole from 320,000 down to around 150,000 by tightening the qualifications; special bonuses were offered to families with many children to stall depopulation. Plans were drawn for the conduct of a census. Citizenship was extended to a number of communities in Cisalpine Gaul and to Cádiz. During the civil wars, Caesar had also instituted a novel debt repayment programme (no debts would be forgiven but they could be paid in kind), remitted rents up to a certain amount, and thrown games distributing food. Many of his enemies during the civil wars were pardoned - Caesar's clemency was exalted in his propaganda and temple works - with the intent to cultivate gratitude and draw a contrast between himself and the vengeful dictatorship of Sulla.

The building programmes, started prior to his expedition to Spain, continued, with the construction of the Forum of Caesar and the Temple of Venus Genetrix therein. Other public works, including an expansion of Ostia's port and a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, were also planned.[citation needed ] Very busy with this work, the heavy-handedness with which he ignored the Senate, magistrates, and those who came to visit him also alienated many in Rome.

The collegia, civic associations restored by Clodius in 58 BC, were again abolished. His actions to reward his supporters saw him allow his subordinates illegal triumphal processions and resign the consulship on the last day of the year so any ally could be elected as suffect consul for a single day. Corruption on the part of his partisans was also overlooked to ensure their support; provincial cities and client kingdoms were extorted for favours to pay his bills.

Conspiracy and death

Denarius (42 BC) of Cassius and Lentulus Spinther, depicting the crowned head of Liberty and on the reverse a sacrificial jug and lituus.[209]

An 1867 depiction of Caesar's death. The Death of Caesar by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Attempts in January 44 BC to call Caesar rex ( lit. 'king') - a title associated with arbitrary oppression against citizens - were shut down by two tribunes before a supportive crowd. Caesar, claiming that the two tribunes infringed on his honour by doing so, had them deposed from office and ejected from the Senate. The incident both undermined Caesar's original arguments for pursuing the civil war (protecting the tribunes) and angered a public which still revered the tribunes as protectors of popular freedom. Shortly before 15 February 44 BC, he assumed the dictatorship for life, putting an end to any hopes that his powers would be merely temporary. Just days after his assumption of the life dictatorship, he publicly rejected a diadem from Antony at celebrations for the Lupercalia. Interpretations of the episode vary: he may have been rejecting the diadem publicly only because the crowd was insufficiently supportive; he could have done it performatively to signal he was no monarch; alternatively, Antony could have acted on his own initiative. By this point, however, rumour was rife that Caesar - already wearing the dress of a monarch - sought a formal crown and the episode did little to reassure.

The plan to assassinate Caesar had started by the summer of 45 BC. An attempt to recruit Antony was made around that time, though he declined and gave Caesar no warning. By February 44 BC, there were some sixty conspirators. It is clear that by this time, the victorious Caesarian coalition from the civil war had broken apart. While most of the conspirators were former Pompeians, they were joined by a substantial number of Caesarians. Among their leaders were Gaius Trebonius (consul in 45), Decimus Brutus (consul designate for 42), as well as Cassius and Brutus (both praetors in 44 BC). Trebonius and Decimus had joined Caesar during the war while Brutus and Cassius had joined Pompey; other Caesarians involved included Servius Sulpicius Galba, Lucius Minucius Basilus, Lucius Tullius Cimber, and Gaius Servilius Casca. Many of the conspirators would have been candidates in the consular elections for 43 to 41 BC, likely dismayed by Caesar's sham elections in early 44 BC that produced advance results for the years 43-41 BC. Those electoral results came from the grace of the dictator and not that of the people; for the republican elite this was no substitute for actual popular support. Nor is it likely that the subordination of the normal magistrates to Caesar's masters of horse ( Latin: magistri equitum) was appreciated.

Brutus, who claimed descent from the Lucius Junius Brutus who had driven out the kings and the Gaius Servilius Ahala who had freed Rome from incipient tyranny, was the main leader of the conspiracy. By late autumn 45 BC, graffiti and some public comments at Rome were condemning Caesar as a tyrant and insinuating the need for a Brutus to remove the dictator. The ancient sources, excepting Nicolaus of Damascus, are unanimous that this reflected a genuine turn in public opinion against Caesar. Popular indignation at Caesar was likely rooted in his debt policies (too friendly to lenders), use of lethal force to suppress protests for debt relief, his reduction in the grain dole, his abolition of the collegia restored by Clodius, his abolition of the poorest panel of jurors in the permanent courts, and his abolition of open elections which deprived the people of their ancient right of decision. A popular turn against Caesar is also observed with reports that the two deposed tribunes were written-in on ballots at Caesar's advance consular elections in place of Caesar's candidates. Whether there was a tradition of tyrannicide at Rome is unclear: Cicero wrote in private as if the duty to kill tyrants was already given; he, however, made no public speeches to that effect and there is little evidence that the public accepted the logic of preventive tyrannicide. The philosophical tradition of the Platonic Old Academy was also a factor driving Brutus to action due to its emphasis on a duty to free the state from tyranny.

While some news of the conspiracy did leak out, Caesar refused to take precautions and rejected escort by a bodyguard. The date decided upon by the conspirators was 15 March, the Ides of March, three days before Caesar intended to leave for his Parthian campaign. News of his imminent departure forced the conspirators to move up their plans; the Senate meeting on the 15th would be the last before his departure. They had decided that a Senate meeting was the best place to frame the killing as political, rejecting the alternatives at games, elections, or on the road. That only the conspirators would be armed at the Senate meeting, per Dio, also would have been an advantage. The day, 15 March, was also symbolically important as it was the day on which consuls took office until the mid-2nd century BC.

The Ides of March coin, minted in 42 BC, depicts Marcus Junius Brutus. The reverse depicts daggers and a pileus symbolising their use to win back freedom.

Various stories purport that Caesar was on the cusp of not attending or otherwise being warned about the plot. Approached on his golden chair at the foot of the statue of Pompey, the conspirators attacked him with daggers. Whether he fell in silence, per Suetonius, or after reply to Brutus' appearance - kai su teknon? ("you too, child?") - is variantly recorded. Between twenty-three and thirty-five wounds later, the dictator-for-life was dead.

Aftermath of the assassination

Marc Antony's Oration at Caesar's Funeral by George Edward Robertson (late 19th or early 20th century).

The assassins seized the Capitoline hill after killing the dictator. They then summoned a public meeting in the Forum where they were coldly received by the population. They were also unable to fully secure the city, as Lepidus - Caesar's lieutenant in the dictatorship - moved troops from the Tiber Island into the city proper. Antony, the consul who escaped the assassination, urged an illogical compromise position in the Senate: Caesar was not declared a tyrant and the conspirators were not punished.

Caesar's funeral was then approved. At the funeral, Antony inflamed the public against the assassins, which triggered mob violence that lasted for some months before the assassins were forced to flee the capital and Antony then finally acted to suppress it by force. On the site of his cremation, the Temple of Caesar was begun by the triumvirs in 42 BC at the east side of the main square of the Roman Forum. Only its altar now remains. The terms of the will were also read to the public: it gave a generous donative to the plebs at large and left as principal heir one Gaius Octavius, Caesar's great-nephew then at Apollonia, and adopted him in the will.

Resumption of the pre-existing republic proved impossible as various actors appealed in the aftermath of Caesar's death to liberty or to vengeance to mobilise huge armies that led to a series of civil wars. The first war was between Antony in 43 BC and the Senate (including senators of both Caesarian and Pompeian persuasion) which resulted in Octavian - Caesar's heir - exploiting the chaos to seize the consulship and join with Antony and Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate. After purging their political enemies in a series of proscriptions, the triumvirs secured the deification of Caesar - the Senate declared on 1 January 42 BC that Caesar would be placed among the Roman gods - and marched on the east where a second war saw the triumvirs defeat the tyrannicides in battle, resulting in a final death of the republican cause and a three-way division of much of the Roman world. By 31 BC, Caesar's heir had taken sole control of the empire, ejecting his triumviral rivals after two decades of civil war. Pretending to restore the republic, his masked autocracy was acceptable to the war-weary Romans and marked the establishment of a new Roman monarchy.

Personal life

Health and physical appearance

Based on remarks by Plutarch, Caesar is sometimes thought to have suffered from epilepsy. Modern scholarship is sharply divided on the subject, and some scholars believe that he was plagued by malaria, particularly during the Sullan proscriptions of the 80s BC. Other scholars contend his epileptic seizures were due to a parasitic infection in the brain by a tapeworm.

Caesar had four documented episodes of what may have been complex partial seizures. He may additionally have had absence seizures in his youth. The earliest accounts of these seizures were made by the biographer Suetonius, who was born after Caesar died. The claim of epilepsy is countered among some medical historians by a claim of hypoglycemia, which can cause epileptoid seizures.

A line from Shakespeare has sometimes been taken to mean that he was deaf in one ear: "Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf". No classical source mentions hearing impairment in connection with Caesar. The playwright may have been making metaphorical use of a passage in Plutarch that does not refer to deafness at all, but rather to a gesture Alexander of Macedon customarily made. By covering his ear, Alexander indicated that he had turned his attention from an accusation in order to hear the defence.

Francesco M. Galassi and Hutan Ashrafian suggest that Caesar's behavioral manifestations - headaches, vertigo, falls (possibly caused by muscle weakness due to nerve damage), sensory deficit, giddiness and insensibility - and syncopal episodes were the results of cerebrovascular episodes, not epilepsy. Pliny the Elder reports in his Natural History that Caesar's father and forefather died without apparent cause while putting on their shoes. These events can be more readily associated with cardiovascular complications from a stroke episode or lethal heart attack. Caesar possibly had a genetic predisposition for cardiovascular disease.

Suetonius, writing more than a century after Caesar's death, describes Caesar as "tall of stature with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full face, and keen black eyes".

Name and family

The name Gaius Julius Caesar

Using the Latin alphabet of the period, which lacked the letters J and U, Caesar's name would be rendered GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR; the form CAIVS is also attested, using the older Roman representation of G by C. The standard abbreviation was C. IVLIVS CÆSAR, reflecting the older spelling. (The letterform Æ is a ligature of the letters A and E, and is often used in Latin inscriptions to save space.)

In Classical Latin, it was pronounced [ˈɡaː.i.ʊs ˈjuːl.i.ʊs ˈkae̯sar]. In the days of the late Roman Republic, many historical writings were done in Greek, a language most educated Romans studied. Young wealthy Roman boys were often taught by Greek slaves and sometimes sent to Athens for advanced training, as was Caesar's principal assassin, Brutus. In Greek, during Caesar's time, his family name was written Καίσαρ ( Kaísar), reflecting its contemporary pronunciation. Thus, his name is pronounced in a similar way to the pronunciation of the German ([kaɪ̯zɐ]) or Dutch ([kɛizɛr]).

In Vulgar Latin, the original diphthong [ae̯] first began to be pronounced as a simple long vowel [ɛː]. Then, the plosive /k/ before front vowels began, due to palatalization, to be pronounced as an affricate, hence renderings like [ˈtʃeːsar] in Italian and [ˈtseːzar] in German regional pronunciations of Latin, as well as the title of Tsar. With the evolution of the Romance languages, the affricate [ts] became a fricative [s] (thus, [ˈseːsar]) in many regional pronunciations, including the French one, from which the modern English pronunciation is derived.

Caesar's cognomen itself became a title; it was promulgated by the Bible, which contains the famous verse " Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's". The title became, from the late first millennium, in German and (through Old Church Slavic cěsarĭ) Tsar or Czar in the Slavic languages. The last Tsar in nominal power was Simeon II of Bulgaria, whose reign ended in 1946, but is still alive in 2023. This means that for approximately two thousand years, there was at least one head of state bearing his name. As a term for the highest ruler, the word Caesar constitutes one of the earliest, best attested and most widespread Latin loanwords in the Germanic languages, being found in the text corpora of Old High German ( keisar), Old Saxon ( kēsur), Old English ( cāsere), Old Norse ( keisari), Old Dutch ( keisere) and (through Greek) Gothic ( kaisar).

Wives

First marriage to Cornelia, from 84 BC until her death in 69 BC

Second marriage to Pompeia, from 67 BC until he divorced her around 61 BC over the Bona Dea scandal

Third marriage to Calpurnia, from 59 BC until Caesar's death

Roman painting from the House of Giuseppe II, Pompeii, early 1st century AD, most likely depicting Cleopatra VII, wearing her royal diadem, consuming poison in an act of suicide, while her son Caesarion, also wearing a royal diadem, stands behind her[261]

Children

Suspected children

Some ancient sources refer to the possibility of the tyrannicide, Marcus Junius Brutus, being one of Julius Caesar's illegitimate children. Caesar, at the time Brutus was born, was 15. Most ancient historians were sceptical of this and "on the whole, scholars have rejected the possibility that Brutus was the love-child of Servilia and Caesar on the grounds of chronology".

Grandchild from Julia and Pompey, dead at several days, unnamed.

Rumors of passive homosexuality

Roman society viewed the passive role during sexual activity, regardless of gender, to be a sign of submission or inferiority. Indeed, Suetonius says that in Caesar's Gallic triumph, his soldiers sang that, "Caesar may have conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered Caesar." According to Cicero, Bibulus, Gaius Memmius, and others - mainly Caesar's enemies - he had an affair with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia early in his career. The stories were repeated, referring to Caesar as the " Queen of Bithynia", by some Roman politicians as a way to humiliate him. Caesar himself denied the accusations repeatedly throughout his lifetime, and according to Cassius Dio, even under oath on one occasion. This form of slander was popular during this time in the Roman Republic to demean and discredit political opponents.

Catullus wrote a poem suggesting that Caesar and his engineer Mamurra were lovers, but later apologised.

Mark Antony charged that Octavian had earned his adoption by Caesar through sexual favors. Suetonius described Antony's accusation of an affair with Octavian as political slander. Octavian eventually became the first Roman Emperor as Augustus.

Literary works

Julii Caesaris quae exstant (1678)

A 1783 edition of The Gallic Wars

During his lifetime, Caesar was regarded as one of the best orators and prose authors in Latin - even Cicero spoke highly of Caesar's rhetoric and style. Only Caesar's war commentaries have survived. A few sentences from other works are quoted by other authors. Among his lost works are his funeral oration for his paternal aunt Julia and his " Anticato", a document attacking Cato in response to Cicero's eulogy. Poems by Julius Caesar are also mentioned in ancient sources.

The Commentarii de Bello Gallico, usually known in English as The Gallic Wars, seven books each covering one year of his campaigns in Gaul and southern Britain in the 50s BC, with the eighth book written by Aulus Hirtius on the last two years.

The Commentarii de Bello Civili (The Civil War), events of the Civil War from Caesar's perspective, until immediately after Pompey's death in Egypt.

Other works historically have been attributed to Caesar, but their authorship is in doubt:

These narratives were written and published annually during or just after the actual campaigns, as a sort of "dispatches from the front". They were important in shaping Caesar's public image and enhancing his reputation when he was away from Rome for long periods. They may have been presented as public readings. As a model of clear and direct Latin style, The Gallic Wars traditionally has been studied by first- or second-year Latin students.

Historiography

The texts written by Caesar, an autobiography of the most important events of his public life, are the most complete primary source for the reconstruction of his biography. However, Caesar wrote those texts with his political career in mind. Julius Caesar is also considered one of the first historical figures to fold his message scrolls into a concertina form, which made them easier to read. The Roman emperor Augustus began a cult of personality of Caesar, which described Augustus as Caesar's political heir. The modern historiography is influenced by this tradition.

Many rulers in history became interested in the historiography of Caesar. Napoleon III wrote the scholarly work Histoire de Jules César, which was not finished. The second volume listed previous rulers interested in the topic. Charles VIII ordered a monk to prepare a translation of the Gallic Wars in 1480. Charles V ordered a topographic study in France, to place the Gallic Wars in context; which created forty high-quality maps of the conflict. The contemporary Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent catalogued the surviving editions of the Commentaries, and translated them to Turkish language. Henry IV and Louis XIII of France translated the first two commentaries and the last two respectively; Louis XIV retranslated the first one afterwards.

Julius Caesar is seen as the main example of , a form of political rule led by a charismatic strongman whose rule is based upon a cult of personality, whose rationale is the need to rule by force, establishing a violent social order, and being a regime involving prominence of the military in the government. Other people in history, such as the French Napoleon Bonaparte and the Italian Benito Mussolini, have defined themselves as Caesarists. Bonaparte did not focus only on Caesar's military career but also on his relation with the masses, a predecessor to populism. The word is also used in a pejorative manner by critics of this type of political rule.

Depictions

Battle record

Chronology

References

1. ^ Keppie, Lawrence (1998). "The approach of civil war". The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-8061-3014-9.

2. ^ Badian 2009, p. 14; Goldsworthy 2006, pp. 31-32. The consul of 157 BC was Sextus Caesar; the consuls of 91 and 90 were Sextus Caesar and Lucius Caesar, respectively.

3. ^ Badian 2009, p. 15 dates the land commission to 103 per MRR 3.109; Goldsworthy 2006, pp. 33-34; Broughton 1952, p. 22, dating the proconsulship to 91 with praetorship in 92 BC and citing, among others, I, 705 and I, 706.

4. ^ Badian 2009, p. 16. Badian cites Suet. Iul., 1.2 arguing that Caesar was actually appointed; because a divorced man could not be flamen Dialis, the assertion that Caesar married one Cossutia then divorced her to marry Cornelia and become flamen in Plut. Caes., 5.3 is incorrect.

5. ^ Badian 2009, pp. 16-17, stating Caesar was placed on the lists. Cf, stating Caesar was only summoned for interrogation, Hinard, François (1985). Les proscriptions de la Rome républicaine (in French). Ecole française de Rome. p. 64. ISBN 978-2-7283-0094-5. OCLC 1006100534.

6. ^ Alexander 1990, p. 71 (Trial 140) noting also that Tac. Dial., 34.7 wrongly places the trial in 79 BC; Alexander 1990, pp. 71-72 (Trial 141).

7. ^ Morstein-Marx 2021, p. 107, citing Suet. Iul., 16. Dio reports a senatus consultum ultimum. Broughton 1952, p. 173, citing Dio, 37.41.

8. ^ Broughton 1952, pp. 173, 180. Most sources give a proconsular dignity. After the Sullan era, all magistrates were prorogued pro consule. Badian, Ernst; Lintott, Andrew (2016). "pro consule, pro praetore". Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.5337. ISBN 978-0-19-938113-5.

9. ^ Gruen 2009, p. 28; Broughton 1952, pp. 158, 173. Bibulus was Caesar's colleague both in the curule aedileship and the praetorship. They clashed politically in both magistracies. On credit for the aedilican games, see Suet. Iul., 10, Dio, 37.8.2, and Plut. Caes., 5.5.

10. ^ Gruen 2009, p. 33, noting that the lex Vatinia was "no means unprecedented... or even controversial".

11. ^ Morstein-Marx 2021, p. 175, citing Moreover, Caesar's eventual provinces of Trans- and Cisalpine Gaul had been assigned to the consuls of 60 and therefore would have been unavailable.

12. ^ Gruen 1995, p. 98. "It should no longer be necessary to refute the older notion that Clodius acted as agent or tool of the triumvirate". Clodius was an independent agent not beholden to the triumvirs or any putative popular party. Gruen, Erich S (1966). "P. Clodius: Instrument or Independent Agent?". Phoenix. 20 (2): 120-30. doi:10.2307/1086053. ISSN 0031-8299. JSTOR 1086053.

13. ^ Morstein-Marx, Robert (2007). "Caesar's alleged fear of prosecution and his "ratio absentis" in the approach to the civil war". Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. 56 (2): 159-78. doi:10.25162/historia-2007-0013. ISSN 0018-2311. JSTOR 25598386. S2CID 159090397.

14. ^ Morstein-Marx 2021, pp. 262-63, explaining:

Any prosecution was extremely unlikely to succeed.

No contemporary source expresses dissatisfaction with an inability to prosecute.

No timely charges could have been brought. The possibility of conviction for irregularities during his consulship in 59 was a fantasy when none of Caesar's actions in 59 were overturned. Morstein-Marx 2021, p. 624.

Caesar proposed giving up his command - opening himself up to prosecution - in January 49 BC as part of peace negotiations, something he would not have proposed if he were worried about a sure-fire conviction.

See also Morstein-Marx 2021, Appendix 2, and, contra Morstein-Marx, Girardet, Klaus Martin (2020). Januar 49 v. Chr.: Vorgeschichte, Rechtslage, politische Aspekte (in German). Bonn: Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH. doi:10.22028/d291-30177. ISBN 978-3-7749-4068-0.

15. ^ Wilson 2021, p. 322 n. 92 on favours for clients. Wilson 2021, p. 322 n. 94, noting Suet. Iul., 54.1-3 reporting on Caesar looting and extorting client states and Dio, 42.49-50, 43.24 on Caesar's forced loans to pay soldiers.

16. ^ Tempest 2017, p. 93; Meier 1995, p. 465 ("their dignity would have been spurious"); Morstein-Marx 2021, pp. 547-48, 549-50 ("honores obtained as a personal favour rather than by a judgment of the People were in fact no 'honour' at all").

17. ^ Morstein-Marx 2021, p. 524-25 gives a number of examples:

Plut. Brut., 9.6: "If only you lived now, Brutus", on the Capitoline statue of Lucius Brutus.

Suet. Iul., 80.3: "If only you [Lucius Brutus] were alive".

App. BCiv., 2.112: "[Lucius Brutus,] your descendants are unworthy of you", challenging Marcus Brutus to act.

Suet. Iul., 80.3: "Brutus became the first consul, since he had expelled the kings; This man [Caesar] at last became king, since he had expelled the consuls", on a statue of Caesar.

Plut. Brut., 9.7; Plut. Caes., 62.7; App. BCiv., 2.112; Dio, 44.12.3: graffiti at Marcus Brutus' praetorian seat in the forum challenging him as asleep, corrupt, or not a true descendant of the Lucius Brutus who founded the republic.

18. ^ Morstein-Marx 2021, pp. 528 (debts), 529 (lethal force, corn dole, collegia), 530 (juries, elections).

19. ^ Richardson, L (1992). "Iulius, Divus, Aedes". A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 213-14. ISBN 0-8018-4300-6.

20. ^ Mackay 2009, p. 334. Caesar's heir then took the style divi filius, meaning "son of the deified one".

21. ^ Ridley, Ronald T. (2000). "The Dictator's Mistake: Caesar's Escape from Sulla". Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. 49 (2): 211-29. ISSN 0018-2311. JSTOR 4436576. Ridley cites:

22. ^ Bruschi, Fabrizio (2011). "Was Julius Caesar's epilepsy due to neurocysticercosis?". Trends in Parasitology. 27 (9): 373-74. doi:10.1016/j.pt.2011.06.001. PMID 21757405.

23. ^ McLachlan, Richard S (2010). "Julius Caesar's late onset epilepsy: a case of historic proportions". Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences. 37 (5): 557-561. doi:10.1017/S0317167100010696. ISSN 0317-1671. PMID 21059498. S2CID 24082872.

24. ^ Gomez, J G; et al. (1995). "Was Julius Caesar's epilepsy due to a brain tumor?". Journal of the Florida Medical Association. 82 (3): 199-201. ISSN 0015-4148. PMID 7738524.

25. ^ Suet. Iul., 45. excelsa statura, colore candido, teretibus membris, ore paulo pleniore, nigris vegetisque oculis.

26. ^ M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim en N. van der Sijs (2003-2009) Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, Amsterdam

27. ^ Tempest 2017, p. 102, noting the "almost universally accepted" treatment rejecting Caesar's parentage at Fluß, Max (1923). "Servilius 101" . Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (in German). Vol. II A, 2. Stuttgart: Butcher. cols. 1817-21 - via Wikisource.

28. ^ Syme, Ronald (1960). "Bastards in the Roman Aristocracy". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 104 (3): 326. ISSN 0003-049X. JSTOR 985248. Chronology is against Caesar's paternity.

29. ^ Wiseman, T P (2009). "The publication of De bello Gallico". In Welch, Kathryn; Powell, Anton (eds.). Julius Caesar as artful reporter: the war commentaries as political instruments. Classical Press of Wales. ISBN 978-1-905125-28-9.

30. ^ Brown, Howard G. (29 June 2007). "Napoleon Bonaparte, Political Prodigy". History Compass. Wiley. 5 (4): 1382-98. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00451.x.

31. ^ Hartfield, James (2012). Unpatriotic History of the Second World War. John Hunt Publishing. p. 77. ISBN 978-1-78099-379-9. Archived from the original on 28 December 2019.

Primary sources

Own writings

Ancient historians' writings

Appian (1913) [2nd century AD]. Civil Wars. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by White, Horace. Cambridge - via LacusCurtius.

Cassius Dio (1914-1927) [c. AD 230]. Roman History. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Cary, Earnest - via LacusCurtius. Published in nine volumes.

Plutarch (1919). "The Life of Cato the Younger". Plutarch Lives: Sertorius and Eumenes; Phocion and Cato. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 8. Translated by Perrin, Bernadotte - via LacusCurtius.

Suetonius (1913-1914). "Life of Augustus". Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Rolfe, J C. Cambridge - via LacusCurtius.

Suetonius (1913-1914). "Life of Caesar". Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Rolfe, J C. Cambridge - via LacusCurtius.

Velleius Paterculus (1924). Roman History. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Shipley, Frederick W - via LacusCurtius.

Secondary sources

Badian, Ernst (2012). "Iulius Caesar, C (2)". In Hornblower, Simon; et al. (eds.). The Oxford classical dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.3394. ISBN 978-0-19-954556-8. OCLC 959667246.

Broughton, Thomas Robert Shannon (1952). The magistrates of the Roman republic. Vol. 2. New York: American Philological Association.

Canfora, Luciano (2006). Julius Caesar: The People's Dictator. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-1936-8. Archived from the original on 26 January 2021.

Crook, John; et al., eds. (1994). The last age of the Roman Republic, 146-43 BC. Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 9 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85073-8. OCLC 121060.

Rawson, Elizabeth (1994a). "Caesar: civil war and dictatorship". In , pp. 424-67.

Rawson, Elizabeth (1994b). "The aftermath of the Ides". In , pp. 468-90.

Wiseman, TP. "Caesar, Pompey, and Rome, 59-50 BC". In , pp. 368-423.

Badian, Ernst. "From the Iulii to Caesar". In Griffin (2009), pp. 11-22.

Gruen, Erich S. "Caesar as a politician". In Griffin (2009), pp. 23-36.

Ramsey, John T. "The proconsular years: politics at a distance". In Griffin (2009), pp. 37-56.

Paterson, Jeremy. "Caesar the man". In Griffin (2009), pp. 126-40.

Morstein-Marx, Robert (2021). Julius Caesar and the Roman People. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108943260. ISBN 978-1-108-83784-2. LCCN 2021024626. S2CID 242729962.

External links

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Gaius Julius Caesar (, SEE-zər ; Latin: [ˈɡaːiʊsˈjuːliʊsˈkae̯sar]; 12 July 100 BC - 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and subsequently became dictator from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell

Born: July 15th 1943

Discovered the first pulsar, CP1919

Famously did not receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for her contributions.

👀 SR

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Praying Altar for Saint Rob, Patron Saint of Easter Egg Hunters and Lost Time

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Pray to SR for guidance on these Easter Eggs hunts

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Several keyarts released independently or via trailers since October have included the same binary pattern.

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Trismegistus written in binary in Hospital in Seoul

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Trismegistus written in binary in Hospital in Seoul

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Hermes Trismegistus may be associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Greeks in the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt recognized the equivalence of Hermes and Thoth through the interpretatio graeca. Consequently, the two gods were worshiped as one, in what had been the Temple of Thoth in Khemenu, which was known in the Hellenistic period as Hermopolis.

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The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.

The philosopher's stone is a mythic alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold or silver; it was also known as "the tincture" and "the powder". Alchemists additionally believed that it could be used to make an elixir of life which made possible rejuvenation and immortality.

For many centuries, it was the most sought-after goal in alchemy. The philosopher's stone was the central symbol of the mystical terminology of alchemy, symbolizing perfection at its finest, divine illumination, and heavenly bliss. Efforts to discover the philosopher's stone were known as the Magnum Opus ("Great Work").

The earliest known written mention of the philosopher's stone is in the Cheirokmeta by Zosimos of Panopolis ( c. 300 AD). Alchemical writers assign a longer history. Elias Ashmole and the anonymous author of Gloria Mundi (1620) claim that its history goes back to Adam, who acquired the knowledge of the stone directly from God. This knowledge was said to have been passed down through biblical patriarchs, giving them their longevity. The legend of the stone was also compared to the biblical history of the Temple of Solomon and the rejected cornerstone described in Psalm 118.

The theoretical roots outlining the stone's creation can be traced to Greek philosophy. Alchemists later used the classical elements, the concept of anima mundi, and Creation stories presented in texts like Plato's Timaeus as analogies for their process. According to Plato, the four elements are derived from a common source or prima materia (first matter), associated with chaos. Prima materia is also the name alchemists assign to the starting ingredient for the creation of the philosopher's stone. The importance of this philosophical first matter persisted throughout the history of alchemy. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Vaughan writes, "the first matter of the stone is the very same with the first matter of all things."

In the Byzantine Empire and the Arab empires, early medieval alchemists built upon the work of Zosimos. Byzantine and Muslim alchemists were fascinated by the concept of metal transmutation and attempted to carry out the process. The eighth-century Muslim alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan ( Latinized as Geber) analysed each classical element in terms of the four basic qualities. Fire was both hot and dry, earth cold and dry, water cold and moist, and air hot and moist. He theorized that every metal was a combination of these four principles, two of them interior and two exterior. From this premise, it was reasoned that the transmutation of one metal into another could be effected by the rearrangement of its basic qualities. This change would be mediated by a substance, which came to be called xerion in Greek and al-iksir in Arabic (from which the word is derived). It was often considered to exist as a dry red powder (also known as al-kibrit al-ahmar, red sulfur) made from a legendary stone-the philosopher's stone. The elixir powder came to be regarded as a crucial component of transmutation by later Arab alchemists.

In the 11th century, there was a debate among Muslim world chemists on whether the transmutation of substances was possible. A leading opponent was the Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who discredited the theory of the transmutation of substances, stating, "Those of the chemical craft know well that no change can be effected in the different species of substances, though they can produce the appearance of such change."

According to legend, the 13th-century scientist and philosopher, Albertus Magnus, is said to have discovered the philosopher's stone. Magnus does not confirm he discovered the stone in his writings, but he did record that he witnessed the creation of gold by "transmutation".

The Squared Circle: an alchemical symbol (17th century) illustrating the interplay of the four elements of matter symbolizing the philosopher's stone

The 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus ( Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) believed in the existence of alkahest, which he thought to be an undiscovered element from which all other elements (earth, fire, water, air) were simply derivative forms. Paracelsus believed that this element was, in fact, the philosopher's stone.

The English philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in his spiritual testament Religio Medici (1643) identified the religious aspect of the quest for the philosopher's Stone when declaring:

The smattering I have of the Philosophers stone, (which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deale of Divinity.

A mystical text published in the 17th century called the Mutus Liber appears to be a symbolic instruction manual for concocting a philosopher's stone. Called the "wordless book", it was a collection of 15 illustrations.

The equivalent of the philosopher's stone in Buddhism and Hinduism is the , also spelled as Chintamani. It is also referred to as Paras/Parasmani ( Sanskrit: पारसमणि, Hindi: पारस) or Paris ( Marathi: परिस).

In Mahayana Buddhism, Chintamani is held by the bodhisattvas, Avalokiteshvara and Ksitigarbha. It is also seen carried upon the back of the Lung ta (wind horse) which is depicted on Tibetan prayer flags. By reciting the Dharani of Chintamani, Buddhist tradition maintains that one attains the Wisdom of Buddhas, is able to understand the truth of the Buddhas, and turns afflictions into Bodhi. It is said to allow one to see the Holy Retinue of Amitabha and his assembly upon one's deathbed. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition the Chintamani is sometimes depicted as a luminous pearl and is in the possession of several different forms of the Buddha.

Within Hinduism, it is connected with the gods Vishnu and Ganesha. In Hindu tradition it is often depicted as a fabulous jewel in the possession of the Nāga king or as on the forehead of the Makara. The Yoga Vasistha, originally written in the tenth century AD, contains a story about the philosopher's stone.

A great Hindu sage wrote about the spiritual accomplishment of Gnosis using the metaphor of the philosopher's stone. Sant Jnaneshwar (1275-1296) wrote a commentary with 17 references to the philosopher's stone that explicitly transmutes base metal into gold. The seventh-century Siddhar Thirumoolar in his classic Tirumandhiram explains man's path to immortal divinity. In verse 2709 he declares that the name of God, Shiva is an alchemical vehicle that turns the body into immortal gold.

Another depiction of the philosopher's stone is the Shyāmantaka Mani (श्यामन्तक मणि ). According to Hindu mythology, the Shyāmantaka Mani is a ruby, capable of preventing all natural calamities such as droughts, floods, etc. around its owner, as well as producing eight bhāras (≈170 pounds or 77 kilograms) of gold, every day.

The most commonly mentioned properties are the ability to transmute base metals into gold or silver, and the ability to heal all forms of illness and prolong the life of any person who consumes a small part of the philosopher's stone diluted in wine. Other mentioned properties include: creation of perpetually burning lamps, transmutation of common crystals into precious stones and diamonds, reviving of dead plants, creation of flexible or malleable glass, and the creation of a clone or homunculus.

Numerous synonyms were used to make oblique reference to the stone, such as "white stone" ( calculus albus, identified with the calculus candidus of Revelation 2:17 which was taken as a symbol of the glory of heaven), (as expressed in the backronym Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem), also lapis noster, lapis occultus, in water at the box, and numerous oblique, mystical or mythological references such as Adam, Aer, Animal, Alkahest, Antidotus, Antimonium, Aqua benedicta, Aqua volans per aeram, Arcanum, Atramentum, Autumnus, Basilicus, Brutorum cor, Bufo, Capillus, Capistrum auri, Carbones, Cerberus, Chaos, Cinis cineris, Crocus, Dominus philosophorum, Divine quintessence, Draco elixir, Filius ignis, Fimus, Folium, Frater, Granum, Granum frumenti, Haematites, Hepar, Herba, Herbalis, Lac, Melancholia, Ovum philosophorum, Panacea salutifera, Pandora, Phoenix, Philosophic mercury, Pyrites, Radices arboris solares, Regina, Rex regum, Sal metallorum, Salvator terrenus, Talcum, Thesaurus, Ventus hermetis. Many of the medieval allegories of Christ were adopted for the lapis, and the Christ and the Stone were indeed taken as identical in a mystical sense. The name of "Stone" or lapis itself is informed by early Christian allegory, such as Priscillian (4th century), who stated,

Unicornis est Deus, nobis petra Christus, nobis lapis angularis Jesus, nobis hominum homo Christus (One-horned is God, Christ the rock to us, Jesus the cornerstone to us, Christ the man of men to us.)

In some texts, it is simply called "stone", or our stone, or in the case of Thomas Norton's Ordinal, "oure delycious stone". The stone was frequently praised and referred to in such terms.

It may be noted that the Latin expression lapis philosophorum, as well as the Arabic ḥajar al-falāsifa from which the Latin derives, both employ the plural form of the word for philosopher. Thus a literal translation would be philosophers' stone rather than philosopher's stone.

Philosopher's stone as pictured in Atalanta Fugiens Emblem 21

The first key of Basil Valentine, emblem associated with the 'Great Work' of obtaining the Philosopher's stone (Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine).

Descriptions of the philosopher's stone are numerous and various. According to alchemical texts, the stone of the philosophers came in two varieties, prepared by an almost identical method: white (for the purpose of making silver), and red (for the purpose of making gold), the white stone being a less matured version of the red stone. Some ancient and medieval alchemical texts leave clues to the physical appearance of the stone of the philosophers, specifically the red stone. It is often said to be orange (saffron coloured) or red when ground to powder. Or in a solid form, an intermediate between red and purple, transparent and glass-like. The weight is spoken of as being heavier than gold, and it is soluble in any liquid, and incombustible in fire.

Alchemical authors sometimes suggest that the stone's descriptors are metaphorical. The appearance is expressed geometrically in Atalanta Fugiens Emblem XXI :

Make of a man and woman a circle; then a quadrangle; out of this a triangle; make again a circle, and you will have the Stone of the Wise. Thus is made the stone, which thou canst not discover, unless you, through diligence, learn to understand this geometrical teaching.

He further describes in greater detail the metaphysical nature of the meaning of the emblem as a divine union of feminine and masculine principles:

In like manner the Philosophers would have the quadrangle reduced into a triangle, that is, into body, Spirit, and Soul, which three do appear in three previous colors before redness, for example, the body or earth in the blackness of Saturn, the Spirit in a lunar whiteness, as water, the Soul or air in a solar citrinity: then will the triangle be perfect, but this likewise must be changed into a circle, that is, into an invariable redness: By which operation the woman is converted into the man, and made one with him, and the senary the first number of the perfect completed by one, two, having returned again to an unit, in which is eternal rest and peace.

Rupescissa uses the imagery of the Christian passion, saying that it ascends "from the sepulcher of the Most Excellent King, shining and glorious, resuscitated from the dead and wearing a red diadem...".

The various names and attributes assigned to the philosopher's stone have led to long-standing speculation on its composition and source. Exoteric candidates have been found in metals, plants, rocks, chemical compounds, and bodily products such as hair, urine, and eggs. Justus von Liebig states that 'it was indispensable that every substance accessible... should be observed and examined'. Alchemists once thought a key component in the creation of the stone was a mythical element named carmot.

Esoteric hermetic alchemists may reject work on exoteric substances, instead directing their search for the philosopher's stone inward. Though esoteric and exoteric approaches are sometimes mixed, it is clear that some authors "are not concerned with material substances but are employing the language of exoteric alchemy for the sole purpose of expressing theological, philosophical, or mystical beliefs and aspirations". New interpretations continue to be developed around spagyric, chemical, and esoteric schools of thought.

The transmutation mediated by the stone has also been interpreted as a psychological process. Idries Shah devotes a chapter of his book, The Sufis, to provide a detailed analysis of the symbolic significance of alchemical work with the philosopher's stone. His analysis is based in part on a linguistic interpretation through Arabic equivalents of one of the terms for the stone ( Azoth) as well as for sulfur, salt, and mercury.

The philosopher's stone is created by the alchemical method known as The Magnum Opus or The Great Work. Often expressed as a series of color changes or chemical processes, the instructions for creating the philosopher's stone are varied. When expressed in colours, the work may pass through phases of nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo. When expressed as a series of chemical processes it often includes seven or twelve stages concluding in multiplication, and projection.

The philosopher's stone has been an inspiration, plot feature, or subject of innumerable artistic works: animations, comics, films, musical compositions, novels, and video games. Examples include Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, As Above, So Below, Fullmetal Alchemist, The Flash and The Mystery of Mamo.

The philosopher's stone is an important motif in Gothic fiction, and originated in William Godwin's 1799 novel .

Encyclopædia Britannica (2011). "Philosopher's stone" and "Alchemy".

Guiley, Rosemary (2006). The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 0-8160-6048-7. pp. 250-252.

Marlan, Stanton (2014). The Philosophers' Stone: Alchemical Imagination and the Soul's Logical Life. Doctoral dissertation. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University.

Myers, Richard (2003). The Basics of Chemistry. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, USA. ISBN 0-313-31664-3. pp. 11-12.

Pagel, Walter (1982). Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. Basel, Switzerland: Karger Publishers. ISBN 3-8055-3518-X.

Principe, Lawrence M. (2013). The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226103792.

Thompson, C. J. S. (2002) [1932]. Alchemy and Alchemists. Chapter IX: "The Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life". Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-42110-4. pp. 68-76.

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The philosopher's stone is a mythic alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold or silver; it was also known as "the tincture" and "the powder". Alchemists additionally believed that it could be used to make an elixir of life which made possible rejuvenation and immortality.

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The earliest known use of the word "combind" is from 1477, in the writing of alchemist Thomas Norton.

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Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy mentions eggs in the context of the Philosopher's stone. In the text, the stone is referred to as "oure delycious stone

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Thomas Norton (b. <1436 - d. c. 1513) was an English poet and alchemist best known for his 1477 alchemical poem, The Ordinal of Alchemy.

This letter receiving, I hasted full sore
To ride to my master an hundred miles and more,
And there Forty dayes continually,
I learned all the seacrets of Alkimy

Thomas Norton, The Ordinal of Alchemy

Thomas Norton was born to a merchant, mayor and sheriff of Bristol, called Walter Norton (fl. 1392-1421). In the Ordinal, he says he was one of the three alchemists in England who worked together at the time of the change of the coin under Sir Hugh Bryce (1464) and that he was a full alchemist at barely 28, which means that he cannot have been born after 1436. Norton was present to sign the transfer of some property in Wiltshire in 1454 and must have been of age by then, so an earlier date of birth is more likely. He was born "undir a crosse in thende of shirys three", possibly in Colerne, on the border of Wiltshire, Somerset, and Gloucestershire. Thomas Norton was a member of the important Bristol merchant family of Norton.

Norton is believed to have studied under one of the most prominent alchemists of his time, George Ripley, writing that he "learned all the secrets of Alkimy" through his words. Norton is known to have studied alchemy in the service of King Edward IV, becoming a gentleman of Edward's privy chamber, past at least 1466. Perhaps doing this to compensate for being partly cut out of his father's will. Norton begun the Ordinal in 1477.

Norton was rewarded with land confiscated from the rebels upon Edward IV's return from exile in 1471. In March 1479, Norton accused the incumbent mayor of Bristol of high treason, surrounding an argument concerning the legacy of his father as the mayor. Norton appealed to the king for support but was forced into silence. Norton died on 30 November 1513

Norton's great grandson, Samuel Norton, also became an alchemist - writing of his great grandfather in his work The Key of Alchemy.

An alchemical master "sits at a table in the background surrounded by the symbols of alchemy: a silver crescent moon, a gold ball and a vessel used in experimentation". From the above-mentioned manuscript.[1]

The Ordinal of Alchemy is an alchemical poem composed of 3,102 lines of irregularly rhymed Middle English.

In the beginning of the poem, Norton lambasts the naivete of others who have bastardized the ideas of the ancient masters of alchemy. He tells us to read his book multiple times to get the best out of it, hinting at the esoteric hiding of his name in how he describes that "chaunging of some one sillable May make this Boke unprofitable". He also gives us something of a biography, professing that he began his study of alchemy at a young age and learned "the seacrets of Alkimy" from the adept alchemist George Ripley. He describes that on two occasions he made an " elixir of life" only for it to be stolen away from him by the greed of others - first by his valet, and the second time by a merchant's wife.

Notably, the book contains several verses satirising certain alchemical or hermetic connections to the Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, a work satirizing alchemists. Inadvertently, this played a large part in the Renaissance conception of Chaucer as an alchemist, which was later abandoned as it was found to be untrue.

The book also contains the first supposed description of a dampers, describing Norton's construction of a furnace with no fewer than sixty temperatures it could attain at a single time.

Discovery of Norton's authorship

The first syllables of the first four chapters, showing the name of Thomas Norton (collage).

In 1617 Michael Maier in his Symbola Aureae Mensae, identifies Norton as such:

THOMAS NORTONUS, of Bristol, master of the perfect art, (as seen in two initial syllables of each chapter of the book, which describes this art) well known; wrote English poems, very sharp, not yet published.

Similarly, in 1652 Elias Ashmole in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum identifies Norton:

From the first word of the Proeme, and the Initiall letters of the six following Chapters [...] we may collect the authors Name and place of Residence: For those letters, (together with the first line of the seventh Chapter) speak thus [...].

Both of these men were drawing from the rather esoterically hidden message found in the Ordinal - where, by connecting the syllables from the first lines of the first 7 chapters of the book, a message is found. This message being: "To Mais Nor Ton Of Brise To", or as Maier and Ashmole interpreted it "Thomas Norton of Bristol".

Authorship controversy

For where quick sentencce shall seame not to be
Ther may wise men finde selcouthe previtye;
And chaunging of some one sillable
May make this Boke unprofitable
Therefore trust not one Reading or twaine
But twenty tymes it would be over sayne;

Thomas Norton, The Ordinal of Alchemy

Norton was first identified as the author of the 'Ordinal' in 1617 and has since become the widespread identification of the work's author. However, in 1932, two scholars, M. Nierenstein and P. F. Chapman, criticised this identification (which they named "the Maier-Ashmole hypothesis") under the grounds that, beyond the esoteric link drawn by Maier and Ashmole, very little contemporary evidence seemed to link Norton to the Ordinal. This criticism received little attention in its time and a 1957 article by historian J. Reidy roundly criticised the article, arguing conclusively in favour of the 'Maier-Ashmole hypothesis' by citing various contemporary pieces of evidence that imply that Norton was a significant alchemist and very likely wrote the Ordinal.

Editions and legacy

Norton's Ordinal is reported to exist in 32 manuscripts. A very early and beautifully illuminated manuscript of the Ordinal exists in the British Library (BL Add MS 10302) made during Norton's lifetime and likely under his supervision; it contains many illustrations of alchemical processes and a portrait of Norton himself (see above). A copy from the 16th century is currently owned by the National Library of Israel. This copy holds an inscription noticing that this manuscript was given in 1837 by Baron Bolland to C. J. Blomfield D. D, Bishop of London.

Thomas Norton's Ordinal became a very influential alchemical text in the 17th century, with its Latin translation in Michael Maier's Tripus Aureus. It was reprinted in English as the premier text in Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, along with various engravings of illuminations from Ashmole's manuscript of the work (see below), perhaps based on the British Library MS.

Student receiving a book of alchemy from a master.

The ancient masters of alchemy ( Geberus, Arnold, Razi, Hermes) ruling over wisdom.

Alchemist writing and furnaces being used in front of an early depiction of a scale.

Astrological table for the various states of the sun.

Alchemists experimenting in an early laboratory.

References

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Thomas Norton (b. <1436 - d. c. 1513) was an English poet and alchemist best known for his 1477 alchemical poem, The Ordinal of Alchemy.

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5 Truths in this level 2, combine them for the password

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5 Truths in this level 2, combine them for the password

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1181744431121051648

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https://www.reachthefinals.com/patch-notes-1

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1179536651475763322

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1179534954489725098

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I said “YET” back then… I said “YET” back then… :hug_friend:

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I said “YET” back then… I said “YET” back then… :hug_friend:

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https://discord.com/channels/1008696016318513243/1011929497139953744/1179534705293537290