"Poseidon is coming! Poseidon is coming! I Theseus tell you so, I his son. The sacred bull was killed and the Earth Bull has wakened! The House of Ax will fall! The House will fall!..." "...The earth lurched beneath me, grinding and shuddering. The marble flags I ran on tilted endways, flinging me down on hands and knees. There was a mighty crashing and roaring, shrieking voices, cracking wood. My fingers grasped an edge of paving that worked to and fro like a living thing; I was rocked and tossed about as the strong-laid floor of Daidalos broke like water and surged in waves. And deep below, as he tossed the groaning land upon his great black horns, the Earth Bull boomed and bellowed, louder that the shouts of terror, louder that the thunder of falling column and floor and wall." These passages, from Mary Renault's classic, The King Must Die, come at the point of the novel when a great earthquake strikes Knossos, destroying most of the Place of Ax, while Theseus and his team of bull dancers, The Cranes, are escaping from the Bull Court. The life of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, was entwined with the God Poseidon, lord of the sea and the creator of storms and earthquake, whose bull was the agent of these events. The symbolism of the bull can be found throughout ancient Greek and later Roman culture. This is also true for the coinage. As exemplified below. While this coin, acquired earlier this year, has been posted before, I would like to describe it in more detail in this thread. This is a tetradrachm or double nomos of Lucania, Thurium, located in Southern Italy. This coin was minted between 443 and 400 BC, and coincides with the period of the Peloponnesian War. This is the first issue of the double nomoi. The obverse portrays an Athena with an expression of determination, it seems to me, perhaps pouting to others. The style is of a very fine quality, with echoes of the coinage of Syracuse and other Sicilian city states. Her hair is rendered in a series of waves, somewhat reminiscent of the wavy hair of the earlier Athenian tetradrachms of early Starr groups. Instead of single leaves on the Attic helmet, there is a laurel wreath. The crest is rendered in a more abbreviated compared to some of the Athenian issues. The reverse has a magnificent, dynamic rendering of the butting bull, full of motion, ready to charge, much they way the bulls of the Bull Court must have appeared to the dancers and leapers. Lucania, Thurium, 443-400 BC Tetradrachm or Double Nomos Obverse: head of Athena to the right, wearing crested helmet decorated with laurelwreath. Reverse: ΘOΥΡΙΩΝ; bull butting to the right; to the right: エ. BMC 1 (this obv. die); HN Italy 1762. 15.47 grams Ref: Ex Leu 86 (2003), lot 247; ex B.G. collection 24.5 mm, 12 h. Good VF Extremely rare
My next read is The Persian Boy, followed by The Mirror and the Light, the third book of the trilogy on Thomas Cromwell.
I've never read The Persian Boy. I read The Mirror and the Light right after it was published, and thought it was a worthy finish to the trilogy. Even though I knew how it was going to end!
