… et regno occupato per tres potentissimos ac firmissimos populos totius Galliae sese potiri posse sperant.
Here’s the English translation given in the book:
“… and hope that, when they have seized the sovereignty, they will, by means of the three most powerful and valiant nations, be enabled to obtain possession of the whole of Gaul.”
Here’s my bumbling translation:
”… and having seized the kingdom, through three most powerful and brave peoples, they hoped to be able to be made able to all of Gaul … um … ones.”
Let’s zoom in on the phrase I am having trouble with:
sese potiri posse sperant
Now, this looks to me like “they hope [sperant] … to be able [posse] … to be MADE able [potiri] … ones [sese].”
Is it really “they hope to be able to be made able”? That’s just a ridiculous amount of helping verbs. It reminds me of the man quoted by Dave Barry, who allegedly said to his wife after she couldn’t get a ride, “If I’d a’ known you’d a’ wanted to went, I’d a seed you’d a’ got to get to go.”
But let’s look up potiri. I think it’s the passive infinitive of posse “to be able,” but maybe it’s something else.
[Duck-Duck-Go]
Ah-ha! It’s a different verb.
potior, potiris, potiri I, potitus sum (Dep.)Verb
user edited
Translations
to obtain, to acquire, to grasp, to attain, to reach (goal), to come by (experiences)
I am so excited to be standing in front of this bear that my eyes are closing!
Recently, we had Mother’s Day here in America. My beloved children are now getting big enough that they can take the initiative to do things for me. Thirteen heard on the radio that Bear World was letting moms in free, so he decided we should go. Here he is with the bear, face blurred for privacy. My son is the blonde one and the bear is the dark-haired one.
“Yellowstone” Bear World, despite its name, is not at or in Yellowstone Park but actually closer to Rexburg, Idaho, where you can see the foothills of the Grand Tetons but not the Tetons themselves. The day we went was beautiful and sunny:
The way it works is that you first drive through an animal park, and then you access the parking lot and other attractions. You can drive back through the animal park as many times as you like on one ticket. But there is a very stern warning:
The first part of the park has various ungulates like this rare albino elk:
and this regular elk:
… and also bison.
Then you go through a gate where an employee checks your receipt and reiterates the instructions. Beyond the gate, you are in the bear part of bear world, where you can see multiple bears just hanging out. There are, at least in the black bear area, far more bears than you would normally see all in one place. The trees all have metal cuffs on them, I guess to prevent them from being destroyed by all those bears.
There are feeding troughs for the bears,
and shady places for them to sleep. Many of them were doing just that.
But before you get to where the black bears are, you pass an enclosure with a few grizzly bears. The grizzlies are behind an electric fence.
This is gal is pacing the perimeter.
Notice that she has the distinctive grizzly look: the concave or “dished” face, and the grizzly shoulder hump. They are also a lot larger than black bears.
I say “she.” We assumed all the bears in the park were females, because it’s hard to imagine you could keep one or more males in these conditions without them fighting each other.
Back to the black bear area. The black bears were free to roam across the road if they liked, even right in front of your car. Notice the black bear silhouette: straight muzzle, no hump, smaller. I love the curving feet!
At one point, we even saw some employees standing among the black bears! They were photographing a large tree whose trunk had been torn up. The bears seemed unconcerned.
And now we get to my favorite thing! You see, “black” bears (and actually grizzlies as well!) can be any color. (I am learning so much from Bear World!) They can be blond, for example. We did see one that was black-and-blond patches. But this here … is a cinnamon bear! It’s hard to tell from the picture, but its brown coat was almost ginger. The hair also looked thicker and more luscious than on some of the other bears, almost as if it had been groomed.
Also … and I bet you didn’t see this coming … Bear World also has DINOSAURS!
One of them went so far as to eat Mr. Mugrage.
Thirteen, meanwhile, snuck into a dino’s nest and hatched out of its egg:
I have seen better dinosaur parks, but I have never seen more bears.
He was never entirely sure what “financial services” meant–it seemed to cover a spectrum from innocent to guilty and then extremely guilty with knobs on.
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, pp. 194 – 195
Disclaimer: None of these pictures are mine. I found them on the Internet. If any of them are yours, and you don’t like them being used in this post, contact me and I’ll be happy to take them down.
This is the Lady of Elche, Spain.
As you can see, her shoulders are hunched up. Some people describe her as having an “elongated head,” but it could just be the hat. Or it could be a hat meant to imitate elongated heads, as we see in many other cultures, but especially Egypt and MesoAmerica, where there was also head binding.
The following two links are my bibliography. You can follow them to check what I’m about to tell you about the Lady.
When I first heard that this Lady had been found buried in Iberia, it freaked me out. That’s because my understanding of pre-Roman Iberia was that it was basically Celtic. I was prepared to find Celtic- or Scythian-style artifacts there, such as images of people with narrow chins, large eyes, and moustaches; men with deer antlers; horses, and spirals, perhaps worked in silver, wood, stone, or even gold.
Celtic portrait, with torque necklace
Kurgan stelae in Kyrgyzstan, closer to the probable homeland of the Celts/Indo-Europeans
That’s what I expected to find in Spain. Or maybe something that looked like Etrusacan art, or like statues from the Archaic period of Greece.
I was not prepared for a massive, highly realistic stone statue that looked more classical Greo-Roman in style and featured attire more reminiscent of … I don’t know. Ancient Mesopotamia? Peru? The Lady of Elche freaked me out because it seemed to suggest a whole different style of civilization in Iberia, previously unknown. I was thinking Stone Age or pre-Flood.
Then, I heard that the Lady was believed to be Carthaginian. She instantly became less mysterious, but no less horrifying.
Carthage was a colony of Phoenicians. Phoenicia was an advanced civilization from the Levant. They inhabited the port cities of Tyre and Sidon, near ancient Israel. This explains why the Lady seems to be dressed like someone from the Ancient Near East. The Phoenicians had a shipping empire, so not surprisingly, they started a colony in North Africa. Carthage was here:
As you can see, they are very close to Europe, including territories in Spain. That explains how the Lady of Elche could have Western European facial features and Carthaginian dress.
Like most advanced civilizations of the Ancient Near East, the Phoenicians practiced atrocities in their pagan worship. This was the group that had the god Molech, to whom babies were sacrificed in the fire.
They were dropped down into, or placed in niches in, the red-hot statue. Drums and horns covered the sound of the infants’ screams. Incredibly, Israelites kept taking part in this practice and God had to keep telling them to stop. There was even an Israelite king who “made his son pass through the fire.”
Given that Carthage was part of an advanced, baby-killing empire, the Lady of Elche at once becomes more horrifying. The blank look on the woman’s face becomes more sinister. Is this just a death mask? Or is it because she is cruel? Or mindwiped by all that she had seen and done?
I don’t have any historical reference for this, but an anonymous commenter on the Internet has asserted that the “ear covers” were worn by priests and priestesses to block out the screams of the victims of more gruesome rituals. The bigger the ear muffs, the worse the ritual. I’d like to pooh-pooh that, but it fits with everything else we know about the ancient world. Christ conquering the nations suddenly sounds much less like a step in oppression and more like a relief. If you know more about the earmuff question, I’d love to hear it I wouldn’t exactly love to hear about it, but I’m curious and please send me your information.
If you know how to indicate your interest in the Lady to the algorithm, you may find people dressed in historical re-constructions of the Lady of Elche’s garb, like these:
These ladies all look significantly happier than the original Lady.
Simon scoffed the lot [of cookies] on the trek back to the vicarage, throwing the crumbs to the rooks that trailed him everywhere knowing he always fed them at some point during the day. They had an astonishing collective memory and got quite aggressive with him if he didn’t provide for them. They had been exiled from the East Wing of Burton Makepeace when it was converted into a hotel and seemed to hold him personally responsible for their diaspora.
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, p. 186
But that’s partly my own fault. After all, I had to go and listen to this heartrending testimony …
Jonathan Gass’s story is remarkable for how it consisted of essentially unremitting pain until he came to Christ … and then, for how fast he came to Christ and was transformed.
I say remarkable, but I don’t say unique. Many, many other men and women out there are, as we speak, going through the same unremitting pain. This does not make his story easier to listen to. But look at the peace on his face now.
And then, the same week I listened to Jonathan, I was reading my class of elementary-school students The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I came upon this passage:
For a second after Aslan breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back–then it spread–then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper–then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened his great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn. And now his hind legs had come to life. He lifted one of them and scratched himself. Then, having caught sight of Aslan, he went bounding after him and frisking round him whimpering with delight and jumping up to lick his face.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 184
Aslan turns him back into a lion, and he immediately starts behaving like … a lion.
But not only the individual creatures, but the Witch’s house itself is a picture of a human soul:
“Now for the inside of this house!” said Aslan. “Look alive, everyone. Up stairs and down stairs and in my lady’s chamber! Leave no corner unsearched. You never know where some poor prisoner may be concealed.”
But at last the ransacking of the Witch’s fortress was ended. The whole castle stood empty with every door and window open and the light and the sweet spring air flooding in to all the dark and evil places which needed them so badly.
[And when the castle gates had been knocked down from the inside], and when the dust had cleared it was odd, standing in that dry, grim, stony yard, to see through the gap all the grass and waving trees and sparkling streams of the forest, and blue hills beyond that and beyond them the sky.
These days, if Ben were ever actually to come face to face with the man who had planted the IED that had blown up his life, he suspected he would probably shake his hand and say something about letting bygones be bygones. The Jennings were unfailingly polite, even to their enemies, unless they were actually killing them.
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, p. 158
Out of Babel Books 