Lughnasa                                            Waning Harvest Moon

More time today on Ovid.  Working on Book III:570-574.  This chunk, starting at 509 and running through 579, introduces the story of Pentheus, a cautionary tale about religious zealots.  Pentheus criticizes the seer Tiresias as an alarmist and disses the God Bacchus and his Bacchante as driven by potent drink, irrational, anti-military and decidedly non-Roman.  Later in the story Pentheus will be torn apart by his mother and her fellow maenads in a fit of religious frenzy.

This story warn us to understand religious zealotry as a serious political force and one often prone to violence.

I can feel my Latin muscles growing, a slow process, fed by numerous encounters with various words, sentence constructions, parts of speech.