Aristeas of Marmara. No, really.
Heh. Isn't it nice when a random bit of Classics synchronises perfectly and oddly serendipitously with something you're interested in?
Don't know how many people reading this have read enough Sandman to understand, but here goes. Dream tends to be accompanied by ravens - or more precisely, ravens who used to be people. Matthew, the current raven, asks periodically what happens to the ravens if they ever want to quit, and if they can ever be human again. Dream says that one of his ravens became human again for a while, because he thought he wanted to, and this raven was the poet Aristeas of Marmara. This is the raven who appears with Dream when he visits the Emperor Augustus in the comic, and when Dream explains to the bewildered Augustus that he isn't Apollo, but because he's associated with poets he often gets mistaken for him.
What has this to do with classics, I hear you ask? Well, I just ran across these bits in Herodotus:
'Aristeas...a native of Proconnesus [an island in the Sea if Marmara], says in the course of his poem that he was possessed by Apollo.... Two hundred and forty years after the disappearance of Aristeas....as the Metapontines affirm, he apeared to them in their own country in person, and ordered them to set up an altar in honour of Apollo, and to place near it a statue to be called that of Aristeas the Proconnesian. Apollo, he told them, had honoured them alone of the Italiotes with his presence; and he himself accompanied the god at the time, not however in his present form, but in the shape of a raven.'
Isn't serendity a lovely thing?
It doesn't really go very far on getting my essay on Greek Colonization written though. I really will try to get enough done that I can go to the cinema in the evening, but I really can't promise anything. I don't have a whole heap of time tomorrow, between lectures and tute and choirs. Meh. Sorry guys, I suck.