Hello, everybody, and welcome once again to a bit of
chatter about life, the universe of knitting, and all the other stuff going on –
well, some of it, anyway.
I hope you are all well and that the weather where you
are is as lovely as it is here. We are having a bit of summer again after a
period of rather dismal, chilly and wet weather. It never fails: when the
schools start, the weather turns.
This was supposed to be last week’s post, but knitting
got in the way. Now, of course, the Ravellenic Games as well as the Olympics
are all done, and life can return to normal. The Apple of the Week is related
to sports, though, and The Knitting is nearly all about the Ravellenic
projects. So let’s get onto that.
It’s Monday morning after the party ... the party that
lasted more than two weeks. There has been lots of knitting, lots of reading
and posting in fora (I refuse to call them ‘forums’, that would be selling out),
lots of sport – well, not that much sport, actually. I’ve watched bits here
& there, following the medal counts; we did watch the opening ceremony, but
not yet the closing ceremony. We taped it (not literally, it’s been recorded on
an HD box), because it started at 10 pm, which is too late on a school night.
One of the final events of this year’s Olympics,
taking place on Sunday, was the men’s marathon, in which – not surprisingly –
the three medals were won by Africans, one from Uganda and two Kenyans. I was
just looking at the stats and noticed this, of course, but also that the two
North Koreans came in at exactly the same time. How weird is that?
Running a marathon is a big accomplishment; whether everybody
has it in them, as they say on Marathon Training Academy, I can’t tell. I think
maybe quite a few people who don’t think they can, could if they really, really
want to and are prepared to put in the tremendous effort that it takes to train
and prepare for it. If you make sure to pick the right parents for the optimal genetic
make-up and to grow up in a mountain region for oxygen utilisation
conditioning, you will make it easier on yourself; so remember to do that.
The 42 kilometres or 26.2 miles have become an iconic
distance, something to put on your bucket list for a once-in-a-lifetime
achievement or, for the really ambitious, something to do 50 times in 50 states.
And if you’re Dean Karnazes – which nobody is but himself – 50 times in 50 days in 50 states. Or, for the
likes of sir Ranulph Fiennes, 7 times in 7 continents in 7 days. Amazing.
Now, we all know the story behind the distance, right?
The one about the soldier who, after the battle of Marathon, ran all the way back
to Athens to announce the victory and then dropped dead. Great story, isn’t it?
Full of drama, sensation, and pathos. Quite the tabloid kind of news.
You see where I’m going here? That’s right: do not
believe this story. It’s most likely fiction. We have no textual evidence of
this tale from around the time when it is supposed to have happened, only from
more than 600 years later; and let’s face it, it is rather too good to be true.
There is another story that is much less sensational,
but much more likely and in fact even better.
Let’s have a little background first, from the
historian Herodotus, who wrote about the Persian Wars in BCE 490 and 480-479. Herodotus
gives us several hundred years of history before the wars, to explain how the
Persian Empire expanded and how the animosity between Hellenic and barbaric
(i.e. non-Greek speaking) states arose. He starts out with stories that we
regard as legends: in those days, they didn’t distinguish too much. So one of
the stories is about a prince from Ilion (Troy) who stole a Spartan queen,
which led to a full-scale war – according to the Persian historians, says
Herodotus, this was the cause of all the troubles. Because who in their right
mind bothers to fight over a woman?
Anyway, the Persian Wars:
In 490, the Persian king Dareios the Great decided to
add Hellas to his already vast empire. The Hellenic city states, poleis, weren’t too happy about this,
particularly not the Athenians. They had just invented democracy – or what
passed for democracy in those days – and had no intention at all of being subjects
to a foreign king. They prepared their defence near a town called Marathon
north-east of Athens. Now, the Persian army was huge, so the Athenians decided
to ask the Spartans for help in the upcoming battle – the Spartans being known
elite warriors (more about them later).
To get the message through, they did the usual thing
and deployed a runner. Herodotus tells us that the man, Pheidippides, arrived
in Sparta ‘the next day’ after having run about 150 kilometres. We get no more
details than that, no counting of hours, let alone minutes or seconds, no list
of aid stations or fuelling strategy or anything like that. This is obviously
all in a day’s work for a Hellenic runner. We may guess that he chose to run
through the night, this being August; and we know from the runners who attempt
this distance today that it is regarded as one of the hardest ultra marathons,
through mountainous regions and a climate that can be quite hot.
Anyway, Pheidippides arrived in Sparta with the plea for
help; but the Spartans would not give it. They were in the midst of a religious
festival and could not go to war. Which message Pheidippides then brought back
to Athens. The Athenians were on their own in the battle – and they defeated
the Persians hands down. No problem.
Of course, the Athenians thought they were the cat’s
whiskers after this; but 10 years later, they needed help once again. In 480,
the new king of the Persians, Xerxes son of Dareios, tried to fulfil his father’s
ambitions and add Hellas to the Persian empire. This time, he marched his vast
army across the lands and came to Hellas from the north. At a mountain pass well
known as Thermopylai, he was delayed in his progress for about a week, mainly
due to the heroism of 300 Spartan
warriors, who chose to fight to the death.
Again, it is Herodotus who tells us the story. The
movie is based on a cartoon by Frank Miller; this means that for once, it is
fairly easy to discern what is history and what is fiction: we get the
chronological sequence of events as told by Herodotus, while the more grotesque
elements are quite obvious additions. Very tidy.
To round it all off, even though we are digressing
somewhat from the Marathon theme: in the year following the battle at
Thermopylai, there was a sea battle at Salamis outside Athens, in which the
Persian fleet was destroyed, and another ground battle at Plataiai, where the
Persian army was finally defeated. Xerxes gave up his attempts on Hellas.
Take a moment to think about it: these Persian Wars
were one of the defining events in European – and World – history. If Dareios
or Xerxes had succeeded, it would have been the end of the fledgling democracy
in Athens. The rational thought and scientific endeavours of the natural
philosophers would have been curbed. All of this might, of course, have
resurfaced in later times, but when? Rome was at this time, in the early 5th
century BCE, far too small and weak to have been able to oppose the Persians –
for they would not have been satisfied with just Hellas, they would have
continued their conquests.
We owe a lot to men like Pheidippides, citizen
soldiers who fought to protect their homes and their freedom; just as we owe a
lot to our soldiers today who fight to protect the global home and freedom of
all of us.
Moving on now to The
Knitting:
It feels like I’ve been deadline-knitting for months
... and I have, actually. I started out back in May with the baby blanket and
the shawl that wasn’t finished – and still isn’t, come to think of it.
Then came the wedding blanket that was finished. Just. At the last moment.
In the few days’ lull before the Games began, I cast
on for Laura’s birthday dress – and then, of course, it’s been all about
TARDISes for the past two weeks :o) Mostly, anyway.
 |
| The TARDIS appears quite suddenly |
 |
| Now, how will the Doctor get out of this? |
 |
| More TARDISes! In the middle of the Time Vortex |
I started writing this yesterday and then realised that
I needed to get knitting to get my third Ravellenic project across the finish
line. Which I did. This is the top formerly known as Pythia, that I renamed Daphne because of the laurel leaf pattern. I finished all of my planned projects!
 |
| Remember Daphne? |
And I have been
celebrating it on various Ravelry threads, mostly the one for Team TARDIS.
So today, I’m getting the birthday dress back out. It’s
for this coming Saturday. I can make it; I'm already well into te pattern again and the whole idea of it. No pics yet, but they will be coming.
After all this, it will be nice to be able to choose a
project, maybe even have a day of not knitting very much, if I don’t feel like
it or have other things that need to be taken care of.
Now, before you all shout at me: I am very well aware
that I chose all of these projects myself and that I chose to knit them at all
in the first place. Nobody held a gun to my head; nobody kidnapped my children
and sent me a ransom note specifying knitted items. If that happened, I would
have to call Liam Neeson to come and kill them with pointy sticks.
Anyway, I know that I laid this on myself; I have
no-one to blame. And really, I am not complaining. I enjoy knitting – maybe not
so much the last day and a half of the wedding blanket, when I hated the
pattern and my hands hurt, but apart from that – I enjoy the challenge of
trying out new patterns and techniques and even having specified periods of
time to do them in. I really have enjoyed the knitalong-like experience of
being on a team where everybody knits related items and several people even knit
the same pattern: there are a lot of new Bigger on the Inside shawls out there!
I have been knitting a lot this summer, more than I
probably would have if it hadn’t been for all these self-imposed deadlines. But
nobody got hurt, the garden hasn’t quite turned into a jungle yet, the kids and
the cat were fed. And did I mention I enjoy knitting?
So that is what I will do: knit on to make a dress for
my niece for her 3rd birthday. And everybody is happy :o)
Thank you for stopping by once again! I hope you have
a brilliant week, whether you or yours are back in school or not. I’ll be back,
and until then:
Happy knitting!
PS: A few shots from my garden (I am not showing you the unmowed lawn):
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