The John Marshall House is a historic house museum and National Historic Landmark at 818 East Marshall Street in Richmond, Virginia.  It was the home of Chief Justice of the United States and Founding Father John Marshall, who was appointed to the court in 1801 by President John Adams and served for the rest of his life, writing such influential decisions as Marbury v. Madison (1803) and McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).

Built in 1790, the house was home to Marshall, his wife Mary Willis Ambler Marshall (known within the family as Polly), and their six children.  Marshall lived at the house until his death in 1835.

The house is a Federal-style brick building featuring a dining room, parlor, and large parlor/dining room on the first floor and three bedchambers on the second. It was originally surrounded by an outbuildings including a law office, kitchen, laundry, and stables and sat on a full city block in Richmond's fashionable Court End residential neighborhood. Marshall's neighbors included the attorney John Wickham, who defended Aaron Burr in Burr's infamous treason trial.

History
John Marshall's account books show that he began to make payments for the purchase of the property from "Mr. B. Lewis" on October 7, 1786, and finished the payments on November 19, 1786. The Marshalls called a small wooden house their home while the building on the corner of Marshall and Ninth Streets was being built. The actual date the Marshalls moved into their house is sometimes stated as 1788 and other times stated as January 1791. When John Marshall built his house, Richmond's population was rapidly growing and many new homes were being built. The John Marshall House was one of the first homes to be built in the beginnings of a neighborhood which would later be known as the Court End of Richmond.

The first insurance policy regarding this home, which is dated 1796, states that "whole square, with the house as it is now except for the little wing, and a wooden office on Marshall Street, a wooden kitchen on Ninth, and the laundry" were in John Marshall's ownership at that time. The insurance policy notes that the location of the previously mentioned buildings was lot 786 and that a stable was located at the extreme northwest corner of the square. Without deduction for decay, all the buildings on the property in 1796 were valued at $5500. Luckily for historians, John Marshall kept good records of his finances in his account book. In his account book, he recorded the names of everyone who worked on his home. Mr. Sydnor, Keeling and Smith, W. Goode, W. Duke, and W. B. Lewis are listed as working on the house, with the last payment for work on the home in November 1790. According to Marshall's account books, the total cost of the house was 1211 pounds, 1 shilling, and three pence. Though Marshall's account book shows the last payment for work on the house being in November 1790, construction of fences and outbuildings was still in progress during July 1791. Sometime before the insurance policy was updated in 1810, the John Marshall House expanded with a new wing and three porches, which were not included in the 1796 insurance policy.

Architecture
The exterior appearance of the house has been described as "unpretentious" and "simple in outline and detail." The style of hand-carved woodwork that was common in eighteenth-century houses is found inside the John Marshall House. Panels cover one end of both the parlor and the library, which also both feature small cupboards beside the chimney. The main floor rooms all have dadoes except for the small addition added to the first floor. Though the dining room is absent of any paneling such as that located in the library and parlor, it has a "particularly beautiful" cornice and ornamented mantles. In Houses of Old Richmond, Mary Wingfield Scott describes the rooms as "bright and well proportioned" and notes how "particularly charming" the stairway is. She does, however, criticize the arrangement of the rooms as haphazard and unflattering, noting how upon entrance from a tiny vestibule the visitor must choose between turning right to the library or left to the parlor.

Preservation
The house, while owned by John Marshall's daughter Mary, was rented out to people such as Thomas B. Bigger, Robert Gwathmey, Professor Charles H. Winston, Henry A. Wise, and Mrs. Mattie Paul Myers. By the time his granddaughters, the Misses Anne and Emily Harvie, came into ownership of this house, the lot had been shrunk to only  on Marshall Street and  on Ninth Street. Misses Anne and Emily Harvie sold the lot in 1907 to the City of Richmond, who planned to destroy the house and build John Marshall High School on the site. Women's organizations were able to successfully unite to preserve the John Marshall House. In 1911, the house was placed into the perpetual care of Preservation Virginia (formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) who has operated it as a historic house museum ever since.

The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1960. In 2005, in honor of the 250th anniversary of John Marshall's birth and in recognition of more than 80 years of stewardship responsibility, the house was deeded to Preservation Virginia by the City of Richmond. Since then the house has undergone major restoration work including a new roof, repainting to the original color scheme, and other physical and mechanical upgrades.

The John Marshall House is open seasonally for drop-in tours and throughout the year by appointment and for special events.

See also

List of National Historic Landmarks in Virginia
National Register of Historic Places listings in Richmond, Virginia

References

External links

John Marshall House, Richmond, one photo at Virginia DHR

"The Great Chief Justice" at Home, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan

Historic American Buildings Survey in Virginia
Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia
National Historic Landmarks in Virginia
Houses completed in 1790
Historic house museums in Virginia
Houses in Richmond, Virginia
Museums in Richmond, Virginia
Marshall
Federal architecture in Virginia
National Register of Historic Places in Richmond, Virginia
House
Homes of United States Founding Fathers

John Marshall House


Craugastor persimilis is a species of frog in the family Craugastoridae. It is found in the lowlands and premontane Atlantic slopes of central to southeastern Costa Rica.
Its natural habitats are lowland and premontane moist rainforest. It lives in leaf-litter and can persist in moderately disturbed areas, including plantations. It is an adaptable species that is not considered threatened, despite severe habitat fragmentation within its range.

Craugastor persimilis are small frogs: males grow to a snout–vent length of  and females to .

References

persimilis
Endemic fauna of Costa Rica
Amphibians of Costa Rica
Amphibians described in 1926
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot

Craugastor persimilis


Bella Tabak Feldman (née Bella R. Tabak; born 1930) is an American sculptor. Her work addresses the themes of sexuality, war, and the persistent anxiety of the industrial age. Feldman is known for pioneering the use of glass with steel. Her work has affinities with Surrealism, Post-Minimalism, and the Feminist art movement, although she has no formal affiliation with these. She is a Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts. Feldman lives and works in Oakland, California and in London, England.

Early life and career

Bella R. Tabak was born in 1930 in New York City, to a family of working-class Jewish immigrants from Poland. She grew up in the Bronx tenements. She attended The High School of Music & Art in Manhattan during World War II.

Students were required to visit museums and galleries as part of the curriculum. When Feldman was thirteen, she visited her first art museum, the Museum of Modern Art. There, she saw Meret Oppenheim's Object (1936), the fur-lined cup and saucer, and was struck by her strong psychological response to this work. Other early influences included Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 am (1932) and the sculpture of David Smith. One of Feldman's earliest sculptures Warrior (1952) pays tribute to Giacometti. During the Holocaust, Feldman lost numerous family members who remained in Poland, an experience that helped shape her worldview. This includes her lifelong preoccupation with war, and the overwhelming effects of the military–industrial complex.

Feldman received a BA degree from Queens College, City University of New York. She married Leonard Feldman at age 18, and moved to California with him in 1951 where they both accepted teaching positions. Feldman has two children, Nina Feldman, born 1954 and Ethan Feldman, born 1956.

Teaching
In 1965, Feldman started teaching at the California College of the Arts (CCA). In 1971 she and her family moved to Uganda, East Africa on a grant from the E. L. Cabot Trust Fund at Harvard University. Feldman spent two years teaching art in Uganda prior to the genocidal war in that country. Upon her return to CCA, she faced gender discrimination and a threat to her job. Her successful fight to retain her position prompted her to later become an advocate for other women faculty, who she helped to achieve equity and job security.

Feldman was awarded an MA degree in 1973 from San Jose State University. Her teachers were Sam Richardson, John Battenberg, and Fletcher Benton.

Work

Metamorphosis
In the 1970s, Feldman completed several installations portraying different stages of animal metamorphosis. These featured hybrid, mutant creatures, reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights—rats transformed into fish, and turtles with human features. The small-scale sculptures were displayed in large clusters, their multitude invoking aggression and infestation. Birds (1970), a cast metal flock of dead birds, preceded Kiki Smith's Jersey Crows (1995) while Metamorphic Turtles (1973–75) anticipated Smith's Sirens and Harpies (2002).

War Toys and War Toys Redux
War Toys (1992) is a series created in response to the first Gulf War. Feldman was incensed by the tone of admiration she heard in President George Bush's voice when he referred to the Patriot missile. These works mocked the allure of weaponry and perceived glory in violence. The War Toys series relates to Magdalena Abakanowicz's War Games''' sculptures (1989), giant monstrous weapons made of metal and wood. However, the scale and sensuality of Feldman's War Toys strip them of power. The series is in the tradition of contemporary women artists' critique of war that entwines images of male sexuality and military aggression. Examples include Nancy Spero's The War Series (1966–70), a response to the Vietnam War, and Judith Bernstein's Iraq Travel Poster (1969).War Toys Redux (2003) evoked a different kind of mutation: the metal sculptures represented a hybrid between organic and machine forms. This adaptation continued the series with a new medium, combining blown glass with steel armatures. The sensuality of soft, bulbous glass forms reinforced the vision of earlier War Toys, effeminizing the objects of aggression and rendering them impotent.

 Flasks of Fiction
Feldman pioneered the technique of blowing glass into metal forms in the late 1990s. The first series of mostly hanging sculptures Flasks of Fiction (1998–2001) were originally inspired by the lanterns in mosques Feldman visited while in Turkey. She said of these: "I combined glass and metal to suggest vulnerability and constraint as well as seduction."Flasks of Fiction aligns Feldman with Post-Minimalist sculptors, such as Eva Hesse, who explored the inherent properties of materials and experimented with tension that results from binding bulging forms or upholding drooping forms. In Flasks of Fiction, hardened materials such as glass and steel make explicit references to bodies and sexuality, making the viewer respond viscerally to the corporeal hybrids.

 Large Sculpture
Since 2003, Feldman has created a number of large-scale sculptures that embody her lifelong interest in process and materials. Combining metal and glass, organic forms and machine parts, aggression and vulnerability, such works as Dyad (2003) and Jacob's Ladder (2011) refer to Martin Puryear in scale and to Louise Bourgeois in psychic intensity.

 Exhibitions, collections, awards

Feldman has won numerous awards for her work, and her sculpture is featured in private and museum collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the di Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at museums and galleries including The Oakland Museum of California; the Berkeley Art Museum; Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland; the Alternative Museum, New York; the Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco; Habatat Galleries, Chicago and Royal Oaks, MI; and Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles.

Feldman was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts' Individual Artists award in 1986 and received Distinguished Artist Awards from Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA (2004), and Women's Caucus for Art (2005). A fifty-year survey of her work took place at the Richmond Art Center in 2013.

 References

 Further reading
 Selz, Peter. Solidity is Always Undermined, Sculpture Magazine, October 2014
 Whitney, Kathleen. Feldman at Habatat Gallery, World Sculpture News, Summer 2000.
 Porges, Maria. Bella Feldman'', Sculpture Magazine, October 1998.

External links

Living people
21st-century American women sculptors
21st-century American sculptors
21st-century American women artists
20th-century American sculptors
20th-century American women artists
Sculptors from New York (state)
Queens College, City University of New York alumni
San Jose State University alumni
California College of the Arts faculty
1930 births
The High School of Music & Art alumni
American women academics

Bella Feldman


The Marian reforms were alleged changes to the composition and operation of the Roman army during the late Roman republic usually attributed to Gaius Marius (a general who was consul in 107, 104–100, and 86 BC). The most important of those alleged changes concerned the altering of the socio-economic background of the soldiery. Other changes were supposed to have included the introduction of the cohort; the institution of a single form of heavy infantry with uniform equipment; the universal adoption of the eagle standard; and the abolition of the citizen cavalry. It was commonly believed that Marius changed the soldiers' socio-economic background by allowing citizens without property to join the Roman army, a process called "proletarianisation". This proletarianisation was then supposed to have created a semi-professional class of soldiers motivated by land grants which in turn became clients of their generals, who then used them to overthrow the republic.

Belief in a comprehensive scheme of reforms under Marius emerged in 1840s German scholarship, which posited that any changes in the Roman army between the times of Polybius and Marius were attributable to a single reform event. This belief was spread relatively uncritically and was accepted as largely proven by the 1850s and through much of the 20th century. There is, however, little ancient evidence for any permanent or significant change to recruitment practice in Marius's time. The occurrence of such a comprehensive reform led by Marius is no longer widely accepted by specialists; 21st-century scholars have called the reforms a "construct of modern scholarship".

Other reforms to the army's operations and equipment, said to have been done by Marius, are also largely rejected by scholars. Few of them have any basis in the ancient and archaeological evidence. Others are wrongly dated or misattributed. Changes in the Roman army of the late republic occurred both later (during the Social War and following civil wars rather than at the end of the 2nd century BC) and emerged from circumstance rather than a reformist Marian vision.

Background

The Roman army traditionally found its manpower by conscription from the top five census classes. Those classes were assigned in decreasing order of wealth and allotted citizens to a corresponding century in the . These citizens were called . Citizens who owned less wealth than that required for bottom of the fifth census class were called  () or . These least-wealthy citizens were grouped into a single century which voted after all the others. Under the this scheme, the  were exempt from conscription except when an emergency, called a , was declared; under such circumstances, the poorest were levied as well. The first documented instance of the  being called up was some time in the fourth century; they first received arms at state expense in 281 BC, probably related to the start of the Pyrrhic War.

For much of the 20th century, historians held that the property qualification separating the five classes and the  was reduced over the course of the second century to a nugatory level due to a shortage of manpower. The basis for that belief, however, was merely three undated Roman figures for the amount of property required to serve which would serve as evidence for reductions only if forced into a descending order. Many scholars have also now abandoned the notion that Italy suffered in the second century BC any deficit of manpower which would have driven such putative reductions.

Attributed reforms

In traditional modern historiography, some or all of the following reforms are attributed to Marius. They are, however, variably dated. Many modern sources date them to his first consulship, during the Jugurthine War against Jugurtha of Numidia, in 107 BC. However, it is also possible that other far-reaching actions, especially in opening army recruitment, were undertaken during Marius's repeated consulships from 104 to 100 BC during which Rome faced the serious threat of Germanic invasion.

Ancient attributions
Beyond the attribution to Marius of setting the precedent for recruiting the poor, made by the historian Valerius Maximus in the early 1st century AD, only two reforms (distinguished from mere actions taken by Marius) are attributed, in sources postdating his career by hundreds of years, to Marius directly: a redesign of the  and sole use of the eagle as the legionary standard.

Army proletarianisation

The main putative reform attributed to Marius is a change to recruitment starting, as is generally held, in 107 BC. In that year, Marius was consul, had himself assigned by plebiscite to the war against Jugurtha, and recruited additional soldiers to send to war by enlisting volunteers from both those in the five census classes and also the . The senate had in fact given Marius the right to conscript, but he chose to also enrol some three to five thousand volunteers.

Various motives have been ascribed to Marius's decision to accept volunteers. The motive attributed in Sallust, Marius's personal ambition to seize power, may more reflect Sallust's desire to connect the republic's collapse with moral decline and failure to adhere to tradition. The second edition Cambridge Ancient History viewed it as an expedient to evade popular opposition to conscription. R J Evans, with whom François Cadiou agreed, instead proposed that Marius's decision emerged from his promise of a quick victory in Numidia followed by an energetic effort to follow through by raising and bringing an army as quickly as possible to Africa so to maximise his time campaigning as consul. Regardless, after Marius's victorious return from the Jugurthine War, his volunteers were discharged and, in the following Cimbric War, he assumed command of consular legions recruited via hitherto normal procedure.

It was believed that Marius's decision to enlist volunteers from the  changed the socio-economic background of army by allowing the poor to take it over. These poor soldiers then professionalised and lived only as soldiers. These professional soldiers, disconnected from a society in which they had no property stake, over time became clients of their generals who then used them to seize power in Rome and plunge the republic into civil wars that eventually brought about its collapse. There are, however, no indications that Roman conscription ceased. Nor is there much evidence that later Roman armies during the 1st century BC were made up of volunteers; almost all ancient references to army recruitment, outside private armies, involve conscription.

Conscription continued after Marius's time, especially during the Social War, and the wealth and social background of the men who joined before and after the opening of recruitment changed little. Pay remained extremely low – only five asses per day – and irregular. Moreover, although the surviving sources frequently characterise soldiers as "poor", these sources largely reflect the perspectives of the elite, by whom the vast majority of the population were considered "poor" and for whom poverty needed  not entail actual landlessness. Many of the soldiers of the 1st century BC possessed modest lands. Nor did the legions meaningfully professionalise: as, in general, both soldiers and commanders served only for short periods intending, respectively, to secure plunder or political advancement from military victory. There is little evidence that this putative change in army recruitment created anti-republican client armies.

Equipment changes

Beyond changes to army recruitment, there are only two other reforms attributed to Marius specifically in the ancient sources relate to a redesign for a javelin and the designation of the  (eagle) as the universal legionary standard.

Plutarch relates that Marius altered the design of the Roman , a heavy javelin designed to stick into shields, by including a wooden peg which broke when the javelin was thrown. Many scholars believe this was to prevent the javelin from being thrown back, but it is more likely that the swinging motion of the broken peg was meant to force someone to discard a shield into which the javelin was struck. Regardless of the efficacy or purpose of the redesign, archaeological evidence from the 80s BC through to the early imperial era show that Marius's redesign was not adopted.

Pliny's Natural History attributes Marius with adopting the eagle as the universal legionary standard. This has been interpreted as a rallying symbol for each cohort. Pliny's claim, however, is incorrect; sources show late republican and early imperial legions with other animal symbols such as bulls and wolves.

Modern attributions

Most of the reforms attributed to Marius in various sources emerged only in modern times. These reforms have little ancient pedigree. They rest largely on the basis of comparison between the army described by Polybius and the army in the texts of the 1st century BC with an assumed attribution to Marius.

Equipment at state expense
It is also sometimes claimed that Marius – because the poor citizens enrolled could not afford to purchase their own weapons and armour – arranged for the state to supply them with arms, displacing the traditional system of self-purchase. Such a scheme may have been incipient during Gaius Gracchus' plebeian tribunate (); according to Plutarch, Gracchus passed a law to abolish deductions from soldier pay for clothing. The Italian historian Emilio Gabba argued, for example, that Plutarch's text could be emended from merely encompassing clothing to equipment more generally, reflecting Gabba's belief that this policy emerged from the recruitment of poor soldiers unable to pay for their own equipment.

Neither a Gracchan abolition of deductions for equipment or a Marian programme to equip soldiers is attested in the evidence. There are no indications that Gracchus' law ever came into effect and literary evidence indicates that deductions for clothing and equipment were common in the imperial army of Augustus into the 1st century AD. If Marius purchased equipment for his troops in Numidia at his own expense, later generals and the state in general did not do so.

"Marius's mules" and training

Marius is said in ancient sources to have moved much of the baggage off beasts of burden and onto the backs of the common soldiers, giving them the moniker  ("Marius's mules"). Some modern historians have read this action as a permanent reduction in the size of Roman baggage trains, increasing the speed of army movement. However, attempts to force soldiers to carry their own equipment were common among successful generals at the time; Marius's predecessor in Numidia, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, as well as Scipio Aemilianus, was said to have forced their soldiers to carry their own equipment.

Some modern historians have also attributed to Marius reforms in the training of Roman soldiers which ostensibly reflected a professionalising service. Such training and drilling, however, had become common before Marius due to the loss of collective experience in the generations after the Second Punic War. Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus drilled his men for almost a year before deploying them in the Lusitanian War (); Scipio Aemilianus, for example, drilled his men before his campaigns against Numantia (); Metellus similarly drilled his men prior to their departure to Africa in 109 BC. Such attempts to reintroduce discipline reflected the recruits' lack of military training rather than a class of budding professional soldiers.

Unit composition

Modern historians have also sometimes credited to Marius the abolition of Roman cavalry and light infantry and their replacement with auxilia. There is no direct evidence for this contention, which is driven largely by literary sources' silence on those branches after the 2nd century; continued inscriptional evidence attests both citizen cavalry and light infantry into the end of the republic. The decline of Roman light infantry has been connected not to reform but cost. Because the logistical cost of supporting light infantry and heavy infantry was relatively similar, the Romans chose to deploy heavy infantry in extended and distant campaigns due to their greater combat effectiveness, especially when local levies could substitute for light infantry brought from Rome and Italy.

Marius has also been credited with the introduction of the cohort (a unit of 600 men) in place of the maniple (a unit of only 200 men) as the basic unit of manoeuvre. This attribution is rather dubious and there is no ancient evidence of it; cohorts may have been used as far back as the Second Punic War near the end of the third century BC. The cohort itself emerged as an administrative unit conscripted from Rome's Italian allies and is first attested in a description by Polybius, a usually reliable historian, of a battle which occurred in 206 BC. By the 130s BC, through the Spanish wars and operations with Italian allies, the cohort had developed into a tactical unit. While, after 109 BC, the maniple disappears from the literary evidence, Marius's predecessor in Numidia is documented to have used cohorts in battle: if cohorts replaced maniples around this time, Marius was likely not responsible.

Land and citizenship for veterans

Modern historians have also attributed to Marius the development of the client armies, tying the loyalty of the veterans to generals securing land grants on discharge. This picture, however, is largely an exaggeration stemming from the  () distributing lands to Marius's veterans and poor Romans. No such client army can be seen in Marius's own land laws, which required cooperation from civil society – the senate, people, and other magistrates – and was not imposed by military decree.

Moreover, through the post-Marian period, land distributions were sporadic and volunteers were taken on with no promises or reasonable expectations of land at discharge. Soldiers both in the Marian and post-Marian periods largely went home peacefully when land demands were not immediately met, though land distributions became more common after Sulla's example in the aftermath of his civil war. Only during the civil wars during the later last century BC did demands for land become more prevalent, though not always explicitly to agrarian ends, due to the soldiers' increased bargaining power. For example, during Caesar's civil war (49 – 45 BC), mutineers demanded lands as a pretext for larger cash donatives, and only during the triumviral period (43 – 31 BC) did this pretext fall away.

There is also no evidence that Marius created or operated any system to give veterans Roman citizenship on discharge. Before the Social War there is only a single example of a citizenship grant for martial valour. Most scholars believe that grants of citizenship to veterans became common only under the emperor Claudius in the 1st century AD.

Historiography

Modern historiography has regularly cast Marius as abolishing the propertied militia and replacing it with landless soldiers motivated largely by pay. This belief emerges from the ancient literary sources, but rests on a relatively weak basis.

Most scholars have now abandoned the belief that Marius was responsible for any proletarianisation of the Roman legions in the early 1st century BC and that such proletarianisation occurred at all, concluding that the reforms attributed to Marius are largely figments of modern historiography.

Ancient and 19th century views

Ancient narratives on the Marian reforms largely discussed them in service of the respective narrative's themes. Sallust, the closest source to 107 BC, wrote a narrative lamenting moral decline among the citizenry. To that end, he portrayed Marius's enrolment in 107 in terms of his alleged ambition and disregard for ancestral customs:

Marius's open recruitment, as documented in Sallust, may also be explained not in terms of ambition but also by his desire to recruit as large an army as possible to send to Africa, to do so quickly, or to do so without harming his popularity.

One of the other main sources is Valerius Maximus; he wrote, in a longer passage on the customs of the Roman army, that Marius disregarded its traditional recruitment practices due to his status as a , an aetiology which historians have disregarded as "puerile, naïve, and fanciful". Valerius Maximus' narrative is largely in the interest of creating  (moral parables) of traditions broken rather than conveying historical events.

Other sources, largely far later and dating from the Antonine period (2nd century AD), also associate Marius with allowing the  to join in 107 BC: Plutarch, Florus, and Aulus Gellius. Plutarch's Life of Marius, depending on emendation, may claim that Marius enrolled slaves, which would be a profound exaggeration. Gellius' discussion indicates that there was some disagreement in the sources before him as to the year (during the Cimbric War in 104 or the Jugurthine War in 107 BC) in which Marius recruited the . However, other sources are entirely silent: for example, the abridgement of Livy's history entirely passes over the events from Marius's first consulship and Numidian command (108 – 105 BC), noting only that he was victor over Jugurtha, indicating that Livy or his epitomiser thought Marius's irregular levy unimportant.

It is likely, however, that most of the ancient narratives which connected the collapse of the free state to the self-serving armed proletarian did so in the context of civil war. As literary themes, they were then retrojected into the time of Marius and the Jugurthine War, more than two generations earlier.

The first time a modern historian posited and attributed to Marius a revolutionary and comprehensive reform was in an 1846 book by the German scholar Ludwig Lange. The hypothesis rested on the assumption that any differences between the army of Marius's time and that of Polybius' time could be attributed to a single reform event of which Marius could have been the only progenitor.

The idea was spread by the influential 19th-century classicist Theodor Mommsen in the 1855 second volume of his The History of Rome, which served to bring the idea of the Marian reforms into the core of scholarship. It received more attention in the military historian Wilhelm Rüstow's 1857 book  ('History of the Infantry') which presented the Marian reforms – here conceived as a full overhaul including the abolition of the citizen cavalry, institution of a single form of heavy infantry, uniform equipment, and introduction of the cohort – as an established fact. However, he viewed it only as a step in the full professionalisation of the Roman army and believed that the putative reforms reflected real military needs.

Rüstow's views were largely repeated uncritically by authors including Joachim Marquardt and Theodore Ayrault Dodge. By the early twentieth century, two major overviews in German played a substantial role in also spreading these views. The first was by Hans Delbrück in 1900; the second was by Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith in 1928. While both noted that there were no ancient sources which described any putative large-scale reforms by Marius, they both largely repeated previous scholarship that accepted the Marian reforms as a revolutionary turning point for the Roman army. From there, this view moved into reference works like the Realencyclopädie, and then into Anglophone scholarship via the highly cited 1928 overview The Roman Legions by Henry Michael Denne Parker. Only after the Second World War were these views re-examined.

Post-war critiques

The view inherited from the 19th century sources was challenged in two articles published in 1949 and 1951 by Emilio Gabba, an Italian historian, which held that instead of being a revolutionary change, Marius's decision to enrol the poor was the logical culmination of progressive reductions of the property qualifications in the face of chronic shortages of recruits. Marius's presumed reform then simply swept away the last vestige of a property qualification that by 107 BC had largely ceased to be binding.

In these terms, the abolition of the property qualification was just another stage in the evolution of the Roman army on the long journey to the professional army of the Augustan age. With no sources indicating that the social background of the legions had changed much, if at all, Gabba attributed the notability of the episode to Marius's political opponents' fear that voluntary service undermined traditional methods of gaining political support.

Later historians also downplayed these reforms. The French historian , writing in the 1960s, noted how the  () of conscripts continued through the 2nd century into the late republic; this undermined the previous assumption that volunteer service became dominant after 107 BC. The British classicist Peter Brunt, in his 1971 book Italian Manpower, also questioned the extent to which Polybius' descriptions reflected the army of the mid-second century, noting that many aspects therein were notably archaic and only could have been true in the early third century BC. Gabba's posited property level qualifications and Brunt's attacks on Polybius' credibility broke one of the main assumptions of the 19th century German scholars, namely that the Polybian army persisted largely unchanged until Marius's time. Brunt also found no evidence that volunteers took over the legions and instead concluded that the  raised by the traditional levy still dominated.

Contemporary historiography

The belief in the Marian reforms, by the late 20th century, largely rested on the argument that they reflected a manpower shortage. William Vernon Harris, an American classicist, showed in 1979 that complaints about conscription largely emerged only during campaigns which offered few prospects for plunder; this recast Marius's call in 107 BC for volunteers as reflecting less a dearth of soldiers but rather the relatively little plunder expected for service in Numidia. J W Rich then showed in a 1983 article in Historia that there was no general manpower shortage in Italy and that Marius's use of voluntary enlistment was in fact precedented, undermining the main proposed rationale for recruiting the . Further work on the demography of second-century Italy, especially by Nathan Rosenstein in the early 2000s, showed more definitively from the basis of archaeology there had been no population decline as previous believed in the decades before Marius's first consulship.

François Cadiou, in a 2018 book , largely disproved the traditional narrative that Marius's volunteers had a substantial impact on the composition of the army, that the late republic's armies were made up largely of volunteers, and that those armies were largely drawn from the landless poor. Cadiou, moreover, argued that historians' unwillingness to discard the theory that Marius decisively changed army recruitment, despite the limited evidence for it, emerged from the attractiveness of the theory as a simple explanation for the republic's collapse.

The changes to the Roman army during the 1st century BC are now more attributed to the Social War and the civil wars from 49 to 31 BC. After the Social War, the state also started to keep men under arms for longer periods to maintain available experienced manpower, and coupled this with longer terms for commanders, particularly Caesar and Pompey. Client armies emerged but not in the 100s BC but rather in the decades before Caesar's civil war, which broke out in 49BC. The large-scale downsizing of Roman cavalry detachments likely emerged from the extension of citizenship to all of Italy. Because Italy's enfranchisement meant that Rome was now directly liable for the cavalry's upkeep rather than their local communities, Rome instead levied  from allies who, by treaty, were responsible for their contingents' upkeep.

Contrary to the traditional story of quiescent client armies following their generals, contemporary historiography has established that Roman soldiers during the civil wars needed to be convinced of the legitimacy of their generals' causes. For Sulla and Cinna, such appeals were rooted in the consuls' legitimacy and prerogatives given as a gift of the people. Client armies, instead of being a consequence of putative changes in recruitment, emerged from the prolonged civil wars – themselves fought between armies which believed they were defending the republic – and generals' attempts to secure military loyalty with pay increases.

References

Bibliography

Modern

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Ancient

Further reading

External links

Reform in the Roman Republic
Military history of ancient Rome
Military reforms
2nd century BC in the Roman Republic

Marian reforms


Elena Mauti Nunziata (born 28 August 1946 in Palma di Campania, Naples) is a retired Italian opera singer.

She initially attended the Teatro Lirico Sperimentale in Palermo where she was taught by Gina Cigna, and made her unofficial debut in Sicily as Musetta in La Boheme. Her first recognized success on the stage was as Palermo in Bellini's I Puritani. A soprano lirico, she gained notability playing Violetta in the opera Traviata, a remarkable 1977 production in Madrid, and afterwards played the popular Nedda in the opera Pagliacci. Other notable performances include leading roles in Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Verdi's Trovatore and Forza del Destino. While she ended her international career playing Magda in La Rondine and Tosca from the famous opera by Puccini, during the 1990s she performed again in the Teatro Regio di Torino in the role of Francesca da Rimini.

In the late 90s, while still in good vocal health, Elena Mauti Nunziata left the opera scene with a farewell concert in Brescia, where she performed the end of Act 1 of Traviata.

Sources
McClean, Eric, "Montreal Opera confident as it maps out future", The Montreal Gazette, 24 March 1984, p. C2
Metropolitan Opera, Performance Record:Mauti-Nunziata, Elena (Soprano) on the MetOpera Database
Rich, Maria F. (ed.), "Mauti Nunziata, Elena". Who's Who in Opera, Arno Press, 1976, p. 350.
The New York Times, "Soprano Sings Mimi In Her Debut at Met", 7 November 1977, p. 43
Zurletti, Michelangelo, "Con un Trovatore guerriero Verdi e tornato all'Arena", La Repubblica, 6 July 1985, p. 21

External links
Interview with Elena Mauti-Nunziata, November 22, 1982

1946 births
People from the Province of Naples
Italian operatic sopranos
Living people
20th-century Italian women  opera singers

Elena Mauti Nunziata


Garth Evans (born 1934) is a British sculptor and former college lecturer at St Martin's School of Art, London.

Background
Evans' mother was from Pencoed, her father and brothers were South Wales coalminers. He was born in Cheshire in 1934 and studied at the Slade School of Art in London.

Career
Evans exhibited widely in the 1960s and 1970s including in the group exhibitions British Sculpture '72 at the Royal Academy of Arts (1972) and The Condition of Sculpture at the Hayward Gallery (1975). He had a survey exhibition of his work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2013.

Evans describes his sculptures as figurative. His works were known for their size and grand statements, though they became smaller and less dramatic from the late-1970s onwards.

He has been recipient of a number of awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.

Notable works
Evans created some site-specific sculptures in South Wales in the early 1970s. These included a 40-foot-long unnamed sculpture in coal-black steel, which was installed on The Hayes, Cardiff, in early May 1972. It was inspired by Evans' family stories about the South Wales coalmining (and steel) industry. The sculpture was commissioned by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation for their City Sculpture Project and intended to remain on site for six months. It subsequently moved to Leicestershire where it was put into storage, after being repainted green. In September 2019 it was returned to Cardiff by Chapter Arts Centre, restored and repainted after a £16,000 crowdfunding campaign, then reinstalled close to its original location in The Hayes. A short documentary film was due to be created, based on people's memories of the sculpture.

A number of Evans' works are in the permanent collection of the Tate Galleries. White Relief No.14 is in the collection of Rugby Art Gallery and Museum.

References

External links
 Garthevans.com

1934 births
Living people
Academics of Saint Martin's School of Art
British sculptors

Garth Evans


Christian Jacob Hedemann (25 May 1852  – 18 May 1932) was a Danish mechanical engineer who settled in Hawaii in 1878, where he worked at the Hana Sugar Plantation and the Honolulu Iron Works. He is, however, remembered primarily as an avid amateur photographer who helped found the Hawaiian Camera Club (1889–1893). His photographs of native peoples, landscape, family, and industry offer a unique pictorial record of Hawaii at the end of the 19th century.

Early life
Christian Hedemann was born in 1852 at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Denmark. He was the son of Christian August Ferdinand Hedemann (1810-1879), an eminent surgeon in the Danish army, and Caroline Amalie Cloos (1824-1867). After attending primary school in Næstved, he continued his education at Herlufsholm School and graduated with first class honours in mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic College in Copenhagen. After an apprenticeship in a machine shop, he was employed as a designer by Burmeister & Wain in Copenhagen (1874–78). In October 1877, he married Meta Marie Magdalena Nissen (1850-1952).

Professional life in Hawaii

He arrived in Honolulu with his family in 1878 where, at the age of 25, he became chief engineer on a three-year contract at the Hana Sugar Plantation on the island of Maui. But instead of returning to Denmark at the end of his contract, in 1884 he joined the Honolulu Iron Works, the largest manufacturer of sugar mill machinery in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Initially a draftsman, he ultimately became the company's technical director.

In 1903, he obtained American citizenship and, in 1909, was appointed Danish consul. In March 1917, he was decorated as a knight of the Order of Dannebrog.

Amateur photographer

Hedemann had taken a great interest in photography ever since he visited the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873 where many exhibits featured photography. Before leaving for Hawaii he acquired a camera of his own and learned the art of making images on glass plate negatives, using the wet plate collodion process. The first dated photograph is a view of his house with a Danish flag taken in Hana on 1 February 1880. It was followed by informal portraits of his growing family and home, as well as of the sugar mill, co-workers and friends. In 1883, he converted his carriage shed into a studio with removable roof sections to improve the light. This allowed him to take portraits not only of the native inhabitants, which proved invaluable to ethnic studies, but also of Chinese and Portuguese workers and a small colony of Scandinavians.

The photographs of his wife and seven children show how Danish traditions were maintained, for example in the children's clothing, while his photographs of the mills document the industrial evolution of the islands. Some of these were presented at the Hawaiian Government Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1889, demonstrating not only the progress of the plant, but also the industrial transformation of Hawaii. In January 1889, Hedemann was one of the founding members and the first president of the Hawaiian Camera Club, which brought amateur photographers from Honolulu together with those he had met during his travels around the islands. The club gave Hedemann the opportunity to follow and experiment with the latest techniques such as magnesium powder flash photography and photographic enlargements as well as the use of the so-called magic lantern. In 1892, when he first returned to Denmark, Hedemann took his lantern slide projector with him in order to show his new home to his family and friends.

Hedemann died in Honolulu in 1932 leaving a collection of photographs which provide a record not only of his close-knit family and his faith in the industrial age but also of the islands themselves at the end of the 19th century.

See also
Photography in Denmark

References

Further reading
Lynn Ann Davis with Nelson Foster  (1988) A photographer in the kingdom : Christian J. Hedemann's early images of Hawai'i  (Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press)   and (paperback)

Related reading
Dorrance, William H.; Morgan, Francis (2000)  Sugar Islands: The 165-Year Story of Sugar in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing)
Takaki, Ronald T.  (1983) Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (University of Hawaii Press)

19th-century Danish photographers
American portrait photographers
American people of Danish descent
1852 births
1932 deaths
Danish emigrants
Immigrants to the Hawaiian Kingdom
Knights of the Order of the Dannebrog
American mechanical engineers
American industrialists
Engineers from the Hawaiian Kingdom

Christian Hedemann


Donn Moomaw (born October 15, 1931) is an American former professional football player and Presbyterian minister.

Moomaw played college football for the UCLA Bruins as the center and linebacker for the team. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1973.

Early life
Moomaw was born in Santa Ana, California, and attended its Santa Ana High School.

Football career

Moomaw played linebacker in 1950, 1951, and 1952. During that time, he was named a two time All-American (in 1950 and consensus in 1952), making him the first in UCLA history. He was named MVP both in 1950 and 1952, and he was co-captain in 1952.

In 1953, Moomaw was selected in the first round of the NFL draft by the Los Angeles Rams. However, he did not play in the NFL, noting that he did not want to play football on Sundays. Moomaw signed with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, whose teams did not play on Sundays. He appeared in seven games for the Argonauts in 1953, and two games for the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1955.

Moomaw's UCLA jersey number (#80) has been retired by the team. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1973, and the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame in its inaugural year of 1984. His football legacy at UCLA continues through the "Donn D. Moomaw Award for Outstanding Defensive Player in USC Game", which is still given today.

Minister career
Moomaw later became a Presbyterian minister, most notably serving Los Angeles' Bel Air Presbyterian Church as pastor from 1964 to 1993.  During this time, he became friends with California Governor Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy.  Moomaw gave the invocation at Reagan's inauguration as governor of California in both 1967 and 1971 and later at his 1981 presidential inauguration and 1985 presidential inauguration. His invocation at the 1981 inauguration included a prayer for freedom for 52 Americans.

Sex scandal

In 1993, he was forced to resign as a result of "sexual contact" with five women. In 1997, he was allowed to return to the pulpit on a full-time basis at the 800-member Village Community Presbyterian Church in Rancho Santa Fe.  Prior to that position, Rev. Moomaw was allowed to serve as the guest preacher at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.

References

1931 births
Living people
All-American college football players
Players of American football from Santa Ana, California
American football centers
UCLA Bruins football players
Players of Canadian football from California
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
American Presbyterians
Toronto Argonauts players
Ottawa Rough Riders players

Donn Moomaw


Robots is a platform video game released in 2005. The game was developed by Eurocom and published by Vivendi Universal Games to coincide with the film of the same name.

Summary

PC/PS2/Xbox/GameCube version
A robot named Rodney Copperbottom decides to leave his home at Rivet Town and head to Robot City to realize his dream of working for his childhood hero, Bigweld. He makes a flying robot called Wonderbot out of scrap before he leaves. At the city, he goes to Bigweld's factory, but realizes that Bigweld is mysteriously absent, and finds out that the factory is currently being run by a robot by the name of Phineas T. Ratchet, who hatches an evil plan to create more futuristic robots like himself and destroying old robots made out of scrap.  Rodney also meets a gang of colorful outmodes called the Rusties, who are also affected from the change Ratchet has made. A robot named Jack Hammer tells Rodney that there are many scrap parts in the sewers of Robot City and that Rodney can go collect the scrap in order to keep the Rusties alive. After doing so, Rodney and the Rusties go to Bigweld's Mansion to find Bigweld. Bigweld agrees to help Rodney and the Rusties, and sets off with Rodney to stop Ratchet and save all robot-kind.

DS/GBA version
The DS/GBA plot is basically the same, though the open ended nature of the world means there are a few more diversions. The player begins in a Train Station having left Rivet City as Rodney Copperbottom, and after a brief jaunt through the city you approach Bigweld's Factory, but are told they no longer seek inventors. You sneak into the place and accidentally interrupt a meeting held by Phineas T. Ratchet, who immediately kicks you out.

After being tossed into the underground, Rodney explores and comes across a group of outmodes collectively named the Rusties. They mention that Bigweld has been gone for a long time, and that Ratchet seems to be wanting to destroy them for unknown reasons. Rodney assists a robot named Jack Hammer with a favor, and he informs the player that there's a party going on in the northern part of the map. Rodney ventures there, has a scuffle with Ratchet, and travels to Bigweld's Mansion. You find the old robot, who initially thinks your cause is lost, but decides to assist Rodney anyhow.

He returns to his factory with you in tow, and you come across him being attacked by Ratchet. Rodney escapes by riding Bigweld in another boss fight until he falls into Madame Gasket's lair. You follow quickly and eventually fight the old robot herself, finally putting an end to the tyranny that has been plaguing the city.

Gameplay
This game features Rodney Copperbottom as the playable main character. The player can also play as the Wonderbot in certain areas, and Bigweld in the chase scene.

Rodney can invent different devices by collecting a certain amount of blueprints scattered throughout the environment. In the beginning of the game, he repairs his Wonderbot, his personal companion. He also obtains the Scrap Launcher from Herb Copperbottom, a weapon which uses Scrap as ammo which is found in the worlds of the game, and a wrench which is used as a melee weapon. More weapons are acquired throughout the course of the game. Scrap is also used to purchase items at vendors, including the Maxi-Scrap 500 and Maxi-Scrap 1000 which upgrades his Scrap capacity from 200 to 500 and 1000 respectively, the Refine-O-Max which doubles the value of Scrap, and four mutually exclusive upgrades to his Scrap Launcher which can be replaced at any time. Later while in Robot City he obtains the Magnabeam from Jack Hammer, which uses energy which must be refilled by going on recharge circles, and can also be used as a weapon.

The GBA game functions as more of a Metroidvania-style game, where Rodney has to platform and fight enemies across a sizable world map, collecting upgrades by beating bosses and finding parts scattered across the city for different robots also scattered across the city. The weapons you gain open new areas of the map.

There are a handful of small minigames as well, from a game where you toss oil cans at customers to surviving a torrent of dominos. The fast travel system, taken from the film's transit system, also has a small mini-game where you can collect extra ammunition for weapons.

The scrap launcher remains from the console ports, though you obtain it through delivering an item in the first area rather than getting it from one of the movie characters. The Magnet Bomb attracts enemies closer to it and hits certain switches, and an Electric weapon that does the most damage and hits certain switches. Upgrades can be found for each that allow them to do more damage and have a longer range.

Reception

Robots received "mixed or average"  reviews from critics according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. IGN gave the console versions a 5 out of 10 and wrote, "Sadly, not a Kraftwerk music title, but yet another franchise platformer." While they gave the handheld versions a 4.5 out of 10 and wrote "No matter if you get the GBA or DS version, it's the same boring adventure."

References

Notes

External links

2005 video games
Eurocom games
Game Boy Advance games
GameCube games
Nintendo DS games
Platformers
PlayStation 2 games
Video games about robots
Sierra Entertainment games
Blue Sky Studios video games
Video games based on animated films
Video games developed in the United Kingdom
Vivendi Games games
Windows games
Xbox games
Griptonite Games
Single-player video games
Video games scored by Steve Duckworth
3D platform games

Robots (2005 video game)


August Friedrich Leopold Weismann (Frankfurt am Main, 17 January 1834 – Freiburg, 5 November 1914) was a German evolutionary biologist.

Weismann is much admired today. Ernst Mayr thought he was "one of the great biologists of all time", and ranked him "the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century", after Charles Darwin.

Weismann's barrier
Weismann advocated the germ plasm theory. According to this, inheritance only takes place by means of the germ cells  the gametes, such as egg cells and sperm cells. Other cells of the body (somatic cells or soma) are not agents of heredity. The effect is one-way: germ cells produce somatic cells, and more germ cells. The germ cells are not affected by anything the somatic cells learn or any ability the body acquires during its life. Genetic information cannot pass from soma to germ plasm and on to the next generation. This is referred to as the Weismann barrier. This idea, if true, rules out the inheritance of acquired characteristics as proposed by Lamarck.

The idea of the Weismann barrier is central to the modern evolutionary synthesis, though it is not expressed today in the same terms. In Weismann's opinion the random process of mutation in the gametes (or stem cells which make them) is the only source of change for natural selection to work on. Weismann was one of the first biologists to deny the inheritance of acquired characters entirely. Weismann's ideas came before the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work. Though Weismann was cagey about accepting Mendelism, younger workers soon made the connection.

German work on cells
Weismann's demarkation between germ-line and soma rested on the work of (mostly) German biologists during the second half of the 19th century. This was the time that the mechanisms of cell division began to be understood. Eduard Strasburger, Walther Flemming, and the Belgian Edouard Van Beneden laid the basis for the cytology and cytogenetics of the 20th century. Strasburger, the outstanding botanical physiologist of that century, coined the terms nucleus and cytoplasm. He said "new cell nuclei can only arise from the division of other cell nuclei". Van Beneden discovered how chromosomes combined at meiosis, during the production of gametes. Walther Flemming, the founder of cytogenetics, named mitosis, and pronounced "omne nucleus e nuclei" (which means the same as Strasburger's dictum). The discovery of mitosis, meiosis and chromosomes is regarded as one of the 100 most important scientific discoveries of all times, and one of the 10 most important discoveries in cell biology.

Meiosis was discovered and described for the first time in sea urchin eggs in 1876, by Oscar Hertwig. It was described again in 1883, at the level of chromosomes, by Van Beneden in Ascaris eggs. The significance of meiosis for reproduction and inheritance, however, was first described in 1890 by Weismann, who noted that two cell divisions were necessary to transform one diploid cell into four haploid cells if the number of chromosomes had to be maintained. Thus the work of the earlier cytologists laid the ground for Weismann, who turned his mind to the consequences for evolution, which was an aspect the cytologists had not addressed. All this took place before the work of Mendel had been rediscovered.

References

1834 births
1914 deaths
Cell biologists
German geneticists
German evolutionary biologists
Scientists from Frankfurt

August Weismann


Emanuel Anthony Posselt (1858 – June 28, 1921) was an authority on Jacquard looms and weaving. His book on the Jacquard machine is considered to be a classic.

Biography

Posselt, the son of Emanuel Anthony and Elizabeth (Demuth) Posselt, was born in Reichenberg, Austrian Empire (current Liberec, Czech Republic) on 21 August 1858. Emanuel graduated in 1876 from the Imperial Government Weaving School, also in Reichenberg. During the next two years, he visited most of the important textile manufacturing cities in Europe, and during this time he managed his father's textile mills. In August 1878, he went to the United States, where he worked until 1884 for various textile mills in New England and Pennsylvania.

In 1884, Posselt became the inaugural director of the textile division of Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art. In 1891, he resigned that position to accept the editorship of the Textile Record of North America, at the time a leading trade journal.

Posselt then established a private textile academy and a textile trade book business. He published his own work on the Jacquard machine, the technology of textile design, textile calculations, and cotton, wool and silk industries; as well as works by other authors, such as Gardner on wool dyeing.  The series Hand Books of the Textile Industry and Posselt's Textile Library, as well as Posselt's Textile Journal that ran between 1907 and 1923, are his own.  The last was the immediate forerunner of Textile World.

Posselt died in Philadelphia on June 28, 1921, and is buried in Greenmount Cemetery.

Family

Posselt married in July 1884 at Colchester, Vermont Anna Clera Pollinger, by whom he had three children: Anna (1896), Elwood (1906) and Gertrude (1908).

References

External links
 All of Posselt's books are available in the Digital Archives of Weaving Documents.
 The Complex Weavers Lending Library also has extensive material authored by Posselt.

1858 births
1921 deaths
Textile machinery
History of technology
Weaving equipment
Weaving
Textile arts
Textile design
Artists from Liberec
German Bohemian people
Emigrants from Austria-Hungary to the United States

Emanuel Anthony Posselt


Shadows (Macedonian: Сенки, Transliteration: Senki) is a 2007 film by the Academy-award nominated director Milcho Manchevski. Its motto is "Sometimes the Dead Speak Louder Than the Living". Shadows, a Macedonian-German-Italian-Spanish-Bulgarian co-production was filmed on location in Skopje, Ohrid and several other locations in the Republic of Macedonia.

Plot

Lazar Perkov is the one man who's got everything going for him. He's young, good-looking, has a beautiful wife, lovely little boy, great house and a good job as a hospital physician. In fact, everyone calls him "Lucky." Nothing's missing – except maybe Lucky himself, who's always trying to live up to the expectations of others. Like his bored wife and roguish colleagues. And, above all, his famous physician mother, a driven woman who rose from obscurity to renown with an iron will that crushed all resistance, whether from the living or the dead…

When Lucky is involved in a disastrous car crash and mysteriously saved from a sure death, his life begins to change. He meets strange people: an old man with a baby, an ancient lady speaking a forgotten dialect, a beautiful young woman with a sad secret. Their only message is: "Return what's not yours. Have respect." He gradually becomes aware that it is a message from the afterlife, from tormented souls who seem to die over and over again.

But why have they chosen him?

To answer this question, Lucky must finally grow up and become the man he wants to be.

The action begins at Lazar's home where he has a fight with his wife about how messed up his life was. Pissed off from the fight, he goes for a drive. When trying to light a cigarette in his car, without having the seatbelt on, his phone rings — it is his mother. Then the cigarette falls from his mouth in the desperate attempt to grab his mobile phone on the seat next to him, burning him on the arm. Now he loses control over the car, but meanwhile a woman is crossing the road. Lazar's attempt to avoid hitting her is fatal. His car flips, and crashes until he is found hanging off the car's window whose glass had broken in the crash. The slow movement on the car resting off a building's wall is threatening to crush his dangling head. As all of the people on the streets watch in despair, something moves him away from the car.

Cast

Production
The film was written and directed by Milcho Manchevski, and produced by Mariela Besuievsky, Nermin Gladers, Dimitar Gochev, Gerardo Herrero, and Martin Husmann, Milcho Manchevski, Robert Jazadziski, Corinna Meaner, Elena Melamed, Amedeo Pagani, and Thomas Woodrow. Fabio Cianchetti was the director of photography, David Munns was the production designer, Marty Levenstein and David Ray edited the film, and the music was composed by Ryan Shore and  Kiril Džajkovski. Principal photography took place in Ohrid, Saramzalino and Skopje, Macedonia.

Awards

Macedonian Academy Award Submission, 2008: Best Foreign-Language Film
Golden Ladybug, 2008: Best Actress (Vesna Stanojevska in Shadows)
Golden Ladybug, 2008: Best Music Video (Jungle Shadow in Shadows)
Park City Film Music Festival, 2008: Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement, Ryan Shore, composer
Syracuse Film Festival, 2008: Best Actress, Vesna Stanojevska in Shadows

Trailers

Soundtrack

The music was composed by Ryan Shore.

Critical reception
The film has premiered at several international film festivals, the first being the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was well received with one of the festival's film critics calling it "Manchevski's most ambitious film to date". Other critics, such as Patrick McGavin of Screen Daily, called it "ambitious and capably mounted […] (Manchevski) retains a very fine eye for composition, aided by the sensuous, beautiful work of Italian cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti. The movie's standout quality is the sexy, revealing work of the vibrant, highly alluring young actress Vesna Stanojevska, a professional musician making her film debut. She injects the film with an erotic intensity".

Rotten Tomatoes gave Shadows an average score of 60%, and an audience review of 58%. It had mixed reviews as a "respectable enough ghost story.." although, it was "bogged down with cliches".

IMDb audience gave shadows a 6.8 star rating, while critics gave it a score of 49 from metacritic.com

Stephen Holden from The New York Times, who gave it a score of 60 stated, "As Shadows vacillates between the historical and the occult, you may snicker at the way hackneyed horror movie conventions are redeployed for more serious ends. But you won't be bored. The movie is well acted (especially by Ms. Stanojevska) and very sexy."

The A.V. Club talks about, "It's a very sensual film, revelling in the pleasures of voyeurism.." The A.V. Club had mixed reviews, saying it was well-crafted, although one of his slight.

Release history

See also
List of films of the Republic of Macedonia

References

External links
 Bavaria Film International Website
 Stylus Magazine Review
 Stylus Magazine Review

Manchevski's Shadowsby Joe Bendel, J.B. Spins, January 2009
"Shadows" (review )by Andrew Schenker, January 28, 2009, Slant Magazine
Normalnost Balkana by Dragan Jurak, Feral Tribune, 23. 05. 2008 (in Croatian)
https://web.archive.org/web/20111003001052/http://www.popcornreel.com/htm/shadowsmilcho.htm
http://www.manchevski.com/docs/senki-sexuality%20and%20melancholy%20by%20katerina%20kolozova.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319054629/http://www.hollywoodtoday.net/2008/03/26/original-horror-twist-lurks-in-the-heart-of-%E2%80%9Cshadows%E2%80%9D/#more-4172
http://www.criticsnotebook.com/2009/02/shadows.html
http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Kulturni-dodatak/Kubistichki-mozaik-istine.lt.html
http://www.crpm.org.mk/Papers/MilcoManchevski.htm

2007 films
Macedonian drama films
Articles containing video clips

Shadows (2007 film)


WWE Day of Reckoning 2 is a 2005 professional wrestling video game released for the GameCube by THQ. It is the sequel to WWE Day of Reckoning. The soundtrack features music by industrial metal group A Dark Halo, who performed two songs in the game including its theme song "Burn It All".

Day of Reckoning 2 has improved graphics over its predecessor, a new strategy-based submission system, and a storyline that allows the player to choose paths. This game was the last wrestling and/or WWE video game to be released for the GameCube and the first WWE game to feature Stone Cold Steve Austin as a legend along with the PlayStation 2 game, WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006.

Gameplay
Day of Reckoning 2 features similar gameplay to the previous Day of Reckoning game with returning features such as Momentum shift and momentum lift. New to the game is the stamina meter, which slows wrestlers' movement over time and when completely depleted, temporarily leaves characters winded and open to attack. In addition, different levels of bleeding on the player's character also affect the character's ability to regain stamina.

The game also introduces four types of submission options. While applying a submission hold, players can choose from one of four submission types: a Taunt submission depletes the opponent's momentum meter, a Rest Hold submission allows the player's character to regain stamina, the Drain submission drains the opponent of stamina, while a regular submission move causes damage to a particular body part.

Players can again create wrestlers and customize each character's set of attacks. Each character can be assigned between one and nine finishing moves, one for each position an opponent is in. The game's Story Mode picks up from the story introduced in the first Day of Reckoning, but created wrestlers cannot be imported from the first game.

Story
The story continues from where the original Day of Reckoning left off, with the player's character at the top of the Raw roster. Almost a year after WrestleMania XX, Evolution has disbanded and the player's character has lost the World Heavyweight Championship back to Triple H and has fallen down the ranks of WWE. However, the player's character has gained a love interest in WWE Diva Stacy Keibler.

One month before WrestleMania 21, Triple H loses the title in a controversial match with Chris Jericho and the title is now up for grabs. In an attempt to increase the show's ratings, Raw General Manager Eric Bischoff decides to host a mini-tournament for the World Heavyweight Championship and the finals will be held at WrestleMania 21. The player's character eventually defeats Chris Jericho and advances into the finals. Triple H and the player's character prepare for the finals match before Bischoff reports that the belt was stolen.

The player advances in the story by gathering information on the whereabouts of the World Heavyweight Championship. Soon the player gets framed for stealing the belt, dumped by Stacy, fired and banned from Raw. Soon after, SmackDown! General Manager Theodore Long signs the player to a lifetime SmackDown! contract. Eventually the player wins the WWE Championship and later finds out that former allies Chris Jericho and Randy Orton along with Edge had stolen the World Heavyweight Championship.

With the mystery solved, Triple H asks the player's wrestler for a title match at WrestleMania 21 in a Last Man Standing Match for the WWE Championship. The player's character wins the match, reunites with Stacy and reforges a friendship with Triple H, who turns face and takes possession of the newly found World Heavyweight Championship.

Reception

The game received "generally favorable" reviews according to video game review aggregator Metacritic.

See also

 List of licensed wrestling video games
 List of video games in the WWE Games series
 List of fighting games

References

External links

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Antonio de Berrío (1527–1597) was a Spanish soldier, governor and explorer in Colonial America.

Biography

Antonio de Berrío was born in Segovia. He began his military career at the age of 14 in the service of the king Carlos I. The young nobleman began his military life in Flanders. He entered combat for the first time in the Battle of Marciano that ended with the capture of Siena. Later he was destined to the fight in the African coasts against the Berbers. The next destination was the fight against the Rebellion of the Alpujarras against the rebellious Moriscos. After the conflict in the mountains of Granada, was already appointed as captain of a cavalry company to the surveillance of the coasts of Granada, to finally be appointed governor of the Alpujarras.

Already as governor Berrío marries María de Oruña, maternal niece of adelantado and lawyer Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. The latter, who died in 1579, in his will appoints Berrio and his wife as successors and heirs of their titles and assets. They receive the news by the Correo de las Indias in 1580, Berrío is 53 years old and his life, which seemed to take a calmer course, returns to action.

Upon his arrival in America, and as governor of Trinidad in 1580-1597, title inherited from his political uncle, the adelantado Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, founder of Bogotá and one of the main characters among the conquistadores of New Granada, will continue with the work begun by him
Antonio de Berrio organized several expeditions to Guiana Plateau in his search for the mythical El Dorado.
Between 1583 and 1589 he carried out his first two expeditions, penetrating the hostile and wild regions of the Colombian plains and the Upper Orinoco.

First expedition
The expedition first took place on January 1, 1584. It counted 80 conquistadores and its route crossed Meta River and Tomo River to reach the Orinoco River and the foothills of the Guiana Shield. There he was stopped by rainy season, however, he learned about the existence of the city-state Manõa, a legendary city of gold also known as El Dorado. After examining the west coast, he returned to Bogota in 1585. After this expedition, he moved to the estuary of the Orinoco River, where he founded the city of Sao Thome de Guyana, and Trinidad's city San José de Oruña.

Second expedition
In 1587 he went on a second expedition, lasting over two years. During this time, he investigated the western cliffs of the Guiana Plateau.

Third expedition
In 1590 he began his third expedition, managing to sail the Orinoco downstream until reaching the Caroní, that is when Berrío believed he had found the step he was looking for on his way to El Dorado, but in order to continue with the expedition he needed men and food, therefore part towards the Margarita Island in March of 1591, before building the Santo Tomé de Guayana fortress, founding site of the current Ciudad Guayana, two exact leagues from the right bank of the Caroní River and take possession of the latter in the name of the king Philip II. Upon his arrival in Margarita, passing through Trinidad Island, which he considered a future good base for the following explorations, he was informed of the death of his wife. In 1595 Berrío is 68 years old, has spent his formidable heritage on expeditions, neither the governor of Margarita Province nor that of Caracas wanted to help him with new adventures, so he resorts to the crown. Berrio waits anxiously in Trinidad for the arrival of 300 men and the food and money requested to continue his search for El Dorado.

Fourth expedition. Prisoner of Walter Raleigh.

In April of 1595 two ships arrive at the Margarita island, but they are not the requested reinforcements, they are two English ships under the command of Walter Raleigh, known by the Spaniards as Guaterral. Spain and England were not at war, but relations were tense. Raleigh also suffered El Dorado fever, even studying Spanish to be able to personally read the chronicles that were published in America about America, he himself recognizes in 1596 that he had known for many years the search for El Dorado. Raleigh has a plan and executes it, presents himself with a delegation for friendly purposes, and at the first opportunity assaults the city of San José de Oruña, founded by the lieutenant and commissioner of Berrio, Domingo de Vera Ibargoyen. The square defended by 28 soldiers is taken, taking as hostages Berrio and his lieutenant, Alvaro Jorge, after which Raleigh burns the city. His next act will be to try to locate El Dorado going up the Orinoco, with Berrio as a guide. Berrio took them through the territories already explored by him years ago, El Dorado still did not appear. The expedition of Raleigh returns to Trinidad and the liberation of Antonio de Berrio took place at the end of June of 1595 in the coasts of Cumana, in a prisoners exchange deal.

Death and legacy
Antonio de Berrio died at age 70 in Santo Tomé de Guayana, fortress founded by himself, in 1597, a few days after his son Fernando de Berrío arrived with the reinforcements of troops, food and money he requested to continue with the search for the mythical El Dorado. El Dorado fever also severely affected his son, who would actively continue his search. As for Raleigh, he wrote a famous book of his days, entitled "Discovery of the great, rich and beautiful empire of Guayana" chronicle of his expedition with Berrio. Raleigh was only able to contribute the book, no gold, which earned him a death sentence by James I, successor of the deceased Elizabeth I, but execution was put on hold for an indefinite prison in the Tower of London. After twelve years of captivity, Raleigh regained his freedom, all this time did not serve to forget El Dorado, fever led him to make another expedition in his search that ended in failure and also broke the pact not to damage the Spanish possessions in the new world product of the new policy of alliance of England with Spain, which cost him his head at the hands of an executioner to satisfy the Spanish monarch Philip III on October 29, 1618.

References

Spanish explorers
Spanish conquistadors
Spanish colonial governors and administrators
16th-century Spanish military personnel
1527 births
1597 deaths

Antonio de Berrio


Thessaly ( ; ancient Thessalian: , ) is a traditional geographic and modern administrative region of Greece, comprising most of the ancient region of the same name. Before the Greek Dark Ages, Thessaly was known as Aeolia (, ), and appears thus in Homer's Odyssey.

Thessaly became part of the modern Greek state in 1881, after four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule. Since 1987 it has formed one of the country's 13 regions and is further (since the Kallikratis reform of 2011) sub-divided into five regional units and 25 municipalities. The capital of the region is Larissa. Thessaly lies in northern Greece and borders the regions of Macedonia to the north, Epirus to the west, Central Greece to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the east. The Thessaly region also includes the Sporades islands.

Name and etymology
Thessaly is named after the Thessaloi, an ancient Greek tribe. The meaning of the name of this tribe is unknown, and many theories have been made about its etymology. According to the Dutch linguist Robert S. P. Beekes, the name predates Greek presence in the region and could come from the Proto-Greek form reconstructed as *Kʷʰeťťal-. The Greek linguist Georgios Babiniotis also assigns the origin of the name of the Thessalians to pre-Greek times, although he does not try to explain its etymology. In Aromanian it is referred to as .

Mythology
In Homer's epic, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus visited the kingdom of Aeolus, which was the old name for Thessaly.

The Plain of Thessaly, which lies between Mount Oeta/Othrys and Mount Olympus, was the site of the battle between the Titans and the Olympians.

According to legend, Jason and the Argonauts launched their search for the Golden Fleece from the Magnesia Peninsula.

History

Ancient history

Thessaly was home to extensive Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures around 6000–2500 BC (see Cardium pottery, Dimini and Sesklo). Mycenaean settlements have also been discovered, for example at the sites of Iolcos, Dimini and Sesklo (near Volos). In Archaic and  Classical times, the lowlands of Thessaly became the home of baronial families, such as the Aleuadae of Larissa or the Scopads of Crannon.

In the summer of 480 BC, the Persians invaded Thessaly. The Greek army that guarded the Vale of Tempe was alerted by Alexander I of Macedon and evacuated the road before the enemy arrived. Not much later, Thessaly surrendered to the Persians. The Thessalian family of Aleuadae joined the Persians subsequently. The following year, the Persians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Plataea and withdrew from all of their European possessions, including Thessaly.

In the 4th century BC, after the Greco-Persian Wars had long ended, Jason of Pherae transformed the region into a significant military power, recalling the glory of Early Archaic times. Shortly after, Philip II of Macedon was appointed Archon of Thessaly, and Thessaly was thereafter associated with the Macedonian Kingdom for the next centuries.

Thessaly later became part of the Roman Empire as part of the province of Macedonia; when that was broken up, the name resurfaced in two of its late Roman successor provinces: Thessalia Prima and Thessalia Secunda.

Byzantine period

Thessaly remained part of the East Roman "Byzantine" Empire after the collapse of Roman power in the west, and subsequently suffered many invasions, such as by the Slavic tribe of the Belegezites in the 7th century AD. The Avars had arrived in Europe in the late 550s.  They asserted their authority over many Slavs, who were divided into numerous petty tribes.  Many Slavs were galvanized into an effective infantry force, by the Avars. In the 7th century the Avar-Slav alliance began to raid the Byzantine Empire, laying siege to Thessalonica and even the imperial capital Constantinople itself.

By the 8th century, Slavs had occupied most of the Balkans from Austria to the Peloponnese, and from the Adriatic to the Black seas, with the exception of the coastal areas and certain mountainous regions of the Greek peninsula.  Relations between the Slavs and Greeks were probably peaceful apart from the (supposed) initial settlement and intermittent uprisings. Being agriculturalists, the Slavs probably traded with the Greeks inside towns. It is likely that the re-Hellenization had already begun by way of this contact. This process would be completed by a newly reinvigorated Byzantine Empire.

With the abatement of Arab-Byzantine Wars, the Byzantine Empire began to consolidate its power in those areas of mainland Greece occupied by Proto-Slavic tribes. Following the campaigns of the Byzantine general Staurakios in 782–783, the Byzantine Empire recovered Thessaly, taking many Slavs as prisoners. Apart from military expeditions against Slavs, the re-Hellenization process begun under Nicephorus I involved (often forcible) transfer of peoples.

Many Slavs were moved to other parts of the empire such as Anatolia and made to serve in the military. In return, many Greeks from Sicily and Asia Minor were brought to the interior of Greece, to increase the number of defenders at the Emperor's disposal and dilute the concentration of Slavs.

Late Medieval period

In 977 Byzantine Thessaly was raided by the Bulgarian Empire. In 1066 dissatisfaction with the taxation policy led the Aromanian and Bulgarian population of Thessaly to revolt against the Byzantine Empire under the leadership of a local lord, Nikoulitzas Delphinas. The revolt, which began in Larissa, soon expanded to Trikala and later northwards to the Byzantine-Bulgarian border. In 1199–1201 another unsuccessful revolt was led by Manuel Kamytzes, son-in-law of Byzantine emperor Alexios III Angelos, with the support of Dobromir Chrysos, the autonomous ruler of Prosek. Kamytzes managed to establish a short-lived principality in northern Thessaly, before he was overcome by an imperial expedition.

Following the siege of Constantinople and the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire by the Fourth Crusade in April 1204, Thessaly passed to Boniface of Montferrat's Kingdom of Thessalonica in the wider context of the Frankokratia. With his Greek ties, Boniface won the support of the Greek population and of various important Greek families. In 1212, Michael I Komnenos Doukas, ruler of Epirus, led his troops into Thessaly. Larissa and much of central Thessaly came under Epirote rule, thereby separating Thessalonica from the Crusader principalities in southern Greece. Michael's work was completed by his half-brother and successor, Theodore Komnenos Doukas, who by 1220 completed the recovery of the entire region, and assigned pronoiai to aristocratic Greek families.

The Vlachs (Aromanians) of Thessaly (originally a chiefly transhumant Romance-speaking population) first appear in Byzantine sources in the 11th century, in the Strategikon of Kekaumenos and Anna Komnene's Alexiad). In the 12th century, the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela records the existence of the district of "Vlachia" near Halmyros in eastern Thessaly, while the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates places "Great Vlachia" () near Meteora. The term is also used by the 13th-century scholar George Pachymeres, and it appears as a distinct administrative unit in 1276, when the pinkernes Raoul Komnenos was its governor (kephale).

From 1271 to 1318 Thessaly was an independent despotate that extended to Acarnania and Aetolia, run by the dynasty founded by John I Doukas. John ruled from 1271 until his death in 1289 and was succeeded by his sons Constantine and Theodore. At this time, Thessaly came under Byzantine suzerainty, though it largely retained its independence. After Constatine's death in 1303, it was ruled by John II Doukas until his death in 1318. From 1306 to 1310, the Almogavars or Catalan Company of the East (Societas Catalanorum Magna), plundered Thessaly. In 1310, they occupied a series of forts in the south. From there they departed to the Duchy of Athens, called by the duke Walter I, whom they eventually killed in battle and took over the Duchy of Athens. In 1318, with the death of John II, Thessalian independence came to an end, and the Almogavars occupied Siderokastron and southern Thessaly (1319) and formed the Duchy of Neopatria. The other parts of Thessaly either came under Byzantine rule or were ruled by their own nobility. These local magnates eventually started fighting amongst themselves. Those in the south, such as the Melissenos family of Volos, sought the help of the Catalans, while those in the north, such as the Gavrilopoulos family of Trikala, turned towards Byzantium. At this time, some of Thessaly's ports came under Venetian rule. In 1332, most of Thessaly was taken by the Byzantines following a campaign by Andronikos III Paleologos. He left its administration to Michael Monomachos, who governed  it for the next 10 years.

Groups of Albanians moved into Thessaly as early as 1268 as mercenaries of Michael Doukas. The Albanian tribes of Bua, Malakasioi and Mazaraki were described as "unruly" nomads living in the mountains of Thessaly in the early 14th century in Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos' 'History'. They numbered approximately 12,000. Kantakouzenos describes a pact they made to serve the Byzantine Emperor and pay tribute to him ca. 1332 in exchange for using the lowland areas of Thessaly in the summer months. Albanian groups were given military holdings Fanari in the 1330s and by the end of the 14th century and the Ottoman takeover of the region, they were an integral part of the military structures of Thessaly. Two of their military leaders known in Byzantine sources as Peter and John Sebastopoulos controlled the small towns of Pharsala and Domokos.

In 1348, Thessaly was invaded and occupied by the Serbian Empire of Stefan Dušan, under the general Preljub. After the latter's death in 1356, the region was conquered by Nikephoros Orsini after he won the support of the local Greek population. After his death three years later, it was taken over by the self-proclaimed Serbian emperor Simeon Uroš. Simeon's son John Uroš succeeded in 1370 but abdicated in 1373, and Thessaly was administered by the Greek Angeloi-Philanthropenoi clan until the Ottoman conquest c. 1393.

Ottoman period
Ottoman control began in the late 14th century with the capture of Larissa in 1392-93 and consolidated in the early 15th century. Nevertheless, Ottoman control was threatened throughout this era by groups of Greeks, Albanians and Aromanians who based themselves in the mountainous areas of Thessaly. At the time of the Ottoman conquest, the great Eastern plain of Thessaly was almost entirely depopulated as a result of the nearly continuous warfare of the previous decades. It was resettled by Turkish settlers from Western Anatolia and Greeks from Western Thessaly and the surrounding mountains. In the following decades, the population of this area grew very rapidly as a result of law and order. Thessaly was ruled through the Sanjak of Tirhala administrative division during the Ottoman period. In the 1520s, Muslims made up of 17.5% of the population of the Sanjak.

Failed Greek uprisings occurred in 1600/1 and 1612, and during the Morean War (1684–1699) and the Orlov Revolt (1770).

In 1780, Ali Pasha of Ioannina took over control of Thessaly, and consolidated his rule after 1808, when he suppressed a local uprising. Heavy taxation, however, ruined the province's commerce, and coupled with the outbreak of the plague in 1813, reduced the population to some 200,000 by 1820. Rigas Feraios, the important Greek intellectual and forerunner of the Greek War of Independence was from the region. He was born in Velestino, near the ancient town of Pherae.

When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, Greek risings occurred in the Pelion and Olympus mountains as well as the western mountains around Fanari, but they were swiftly suppressed by the Ottoman armies under Mehmed Reshid Pasha and Mahmud Dramali Pasha. After the establishment of the independent Kingdom of Greece, Greek nationalist agitation continued, with further revolts in 1841, in 1854 during the Crimean War, and again during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. In 1880 Thessaly's population consisted of approximately 285,000 Greeks, 40,000 Turks, and 40,000 Jews.

Modern

Thessaly became part of the modern Greek state in 1881, after the Convention of Constantinople except the area around the town of Elassona, which remained in Ottoman hands until 1912. It was briefly captured by Ottomans during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. After the Treaty of Constantinople (1897), Greece was forced to cede minor border areas and to pay heavy reparations. The remaining part of Thessaly held by the Ottomans was finally regained by the Greeks during the First Balkan War in 1912. In 1923, the entire Muslim population was sent to Turkey following the population exchange between Greece and Turkey at the end of the Greco-Turkish War.

During World War II, Thessaly was occupied by the Kingdom of Italy from April 1941 to September of 1943. After the Armistice of Cassibile, Germany occupied Thessaly until October 1944. It became a major centre of the Greek Resistance, most famously seeing the desertion of the Italian Pinerolo Division to the guerrillas of EAM-ELAS in 1943.

Geography

Thessaly occupies the east side of the Pindus watershed, extending south from Macedonia to the Aegean Sea. The northern tier of Thessaly is defined by a generally southwest-northeast spur of the Pindus range that includes Mount Olympus, close to the Macedonian border. Within that broken spur of mountains are several basins and river valleys.

The easternmost extremity of the spur extends southeastward from Mount Olympus along the Aegean coast, terminating in the Magnesia Peninsula that envelops the Pagasetic Gulf (also called the Gulf of Volos), and forms an inlet of the Aegean Sea. Thessaly's major river, the Pineios, flows eastward from the central Pindus Range just south of the spur, emptying into the Thermaic Gulf.

The Trikala and Larissa lowlands form a central plain which is surrounded by a ring of mountains. It has distinct summer and winter seasons, with summer rains augmenting the fertility of the plains. This has led to Thessaly occasionally being called the "breadbasket of Greece".

The region is well delineated by topographical boundaries. The Chasia and Kamvounia mountains lie to the north, the Mount Olympus massif to the northeast. To the west lies the Pindus mountain range, to the southeast the coastal mountains of Óssa and Pelion.

Several tributaries of the Pineios flow through the region.

Climate
Most of the province has a hot summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen: Csa), but also found is a cold semi-arid climate (BSk) including the capital Larissa (on its Mediterranean edge of category). Even in the north of Thessaly a rare humid  subtropical climate (Cfa) can be found, although it is different from a climate typically below or above the tropics, it also marks the limit of this rare Cf subtype on the European continent (e. g. the small village of Kalvia).

Demographics
The population of the region of Thessaly was 687,527 in 2021 census. The region has shrunk by 45,235 people between 2011 and 2021, experiencing a population loss of 6.2%.

In 2011, the population of the region of Thessaly was 732,762 and represented 6.8% of the total population of Greece. A 2.8% decrease in the population since 2001 was noted, but Thessaly remains Greece's third most populous region.

The population break-down is 44% urban, 40% agrarian, and 16% semi-urban. A decrease in the agrarian population has been accompanied by an increase in the semi-urban population.

The metropolitan area of Larissa, the capital of Thessaly, is home to more than 230,000 people, making it the biggest city of the region.

An Aromanian minority resides in Thessaly. This region, along with Epirus and Macedonia, are the regions with the biggest concentrations of Greek Aromanians. Another notable population group of Thessaly are the Karagounides, an ethnic Greek subgroup.

Language
The Aeolic dialect of Greek was spoken in Thessaly. This included several local varieties, in particular the variants of Pelasgiotis and Thessaliotis. The language was not written.

Apart from Greek, Aromanian is also spoken in Thessaly. Some Aromanian dialects from the region have some unique peculiarities of their own, such as that of Krania, which is one of the few with differential object marking (DOM) along with those dialects spoken at the west of Ohrid in North Macedonia.

Major settlements
Kardítsa (Καρδίτσα)
Lárisa (Λάρισα)
Tríkala (Τρίκαλα)
Vólos (Βόλος)
Néa Ionía (Νέα Ιωνία) (Metropolitan area of Volos)
Elassóna (Ελασσόνα)
Fársala (Φάρσαλα)

Economy

The alluvial soils of the Pineios Basin and its tributaries make Thessaly a vital agricultural area, particularly for the production of grain, cattle, and sheep. Modernization of agricultural practices in the mid-20th century has controlled the chronic flooding that had restricted agricultural expansion and diversification in the low-lying plains. Thessaly is the leading cattle-raising area of Greece, and Aromanian shepherds move large flocks of sheep and goats seasonally between higher and lower elevations.

In the last few decades, there has been a rise in the cultivation of dried nuts such as almonds, pistachios, and walnuts, especially in the region of Almyros. An increase in the number of olive oil trees has been also observed. The nearly landlocked Gulf of Pagasai provides a natural harbor at Volos for shipping agricultural products from the plains and chromium from the mountains.

The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the province was 9.7 billion € in 2018, accounting for 5.2% of Greek economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 16,100 € or 53% of the EU27 average in the same year. The GDP per employee was 65% of the EU average.

The unemployment rate stood at 20.6% in 2017.

Transport
There are a number of highways such as E75, and the main railway from Athens to Thessaloniki (Salonika) crosses Thessaly. The region is directly linked to the rest of Europe through the International Airport of Central Greece, which is located in Nea Anchialos, a small distance from Volos and Larisa. Charter flights link the region and bring tourists to the wider area, mainly in Pelion and Meteora. The new infrastructure includes a brand new terminal ready to serve 1500 passengers per hour and new airplanes.

Administration
Although the historical region of Thessaly extended south into Phthiotis and at times north into West Macedonia, today the term 'Thessaly' is identified with the modern Administrative Region which was established in the 1987 administrative reform. With the 2010 Kallikratis plan, the powers and authority of the region were redefined and extended.

Along with Central Greece, it is supervised by the Decentralized Administration of Thessaly and Central Greece, based at Larissa. The region of Thessaly is divided into five regional units (four were pre-Kallikratis prefectures), Karditsa, Larissa, Magnesia, the Sporades and Trikala, which are further subdivided into twenty-five municipalities.

The region's governor is Konstantinos Agorastos (New Democracy), who was elected in the 2010 local elections and re-elected in 2014 and 2019.

Ancient coinage

See also
Vale of Tempe
List of traditional Greek place names
CERETETH, Center of Technology Thessaly

References

Sources

External links

NUTS 2 statistical regions of the European Union
Administrative regions of Greece
Northern Greece

Thessaly


The Ecbasis captivi (full title: Ecbasis cuiusdam captivi per tropologiam, "The escape of a certain captive, interpreted figuratively") is an anonymous Latin beast fable that probably dates to the middle of the 11th century, and was likely written in the Vosges region of France.  It is the oldest example of a European beast fable to survive, and the first medieval European example of anthropomorphic animals.  The poem is written in hexameters with Leonine internal rhyme frequently used throughout the poem.  The text survives in two manuscripts, both of which now are at the Royal Library of Belgium.

Synopsis
The plot of the poem revolves around a fable within a fable.  A calf has been caught by a wolf on Easter.  The wolf has a dream, warning him not to eat the calf.  Meanwhile, the other animals come to the wolf's cave.

The inner fable is told, which explains why the wolf and fox are enemies.  The lion, king of beasts, was sick.  All the animals suggest cures for the lion except for the fox.  The wolf suggests that the fox should be hanged for his failure to appear and offer a cure.  A panther warns the fox to present himself and make a defense; the fox appears and explains that he was on a pilgrimage.  He offers his cure: flay the wolf and let the lion use his skin as a blanket.  This was done, and the cure worked.  The lion recovers; courtiers sing songs comparing the lion's suffering to the passion of Jesus Christ, and the fox supplants the wolf as regent.

Then, the wolf shows himself to the assembled crowd of animals, which allows the calf to escape.  The wolf is gored by the steer, and the fox writes him an epitaph.

Interpretations
Henry Hallam has written that the poem is unique, not only because it is the first new beast fable to appear in the European Middle Ages, but also because it unites the classical tradition of anthropomorphic fables such as Aesop with the allegorizing Christian bestiary tradition exemplified in the Physiologus and similar popular works.  The story of the cure of the lion has parallels in Aesop.   On the one hand, the wolf of the story is a representation of Satan; on the other hand is apparently meant to represent the monks, who were often depicted as notoriously greedy in period literature.

See also
Ysengrimus
Reynard cycle

References

Bibliotheca Augustana, ''Ecbasis cuiusdam captivi (Latin source text)

Notes

Fables
Medieval Latin poetry

Ecbasis captivi