The Golden Ass (Machiavelli)
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The Golden Ass (Machiavelli)
''L'asino'' (also called ''L'asino d'oro''; English: ''The Golden Ass'') is an unfinished satirical poem of eight cantos written by the Italian political scientist and writer Niccolò Machiavelli in 1517. A modernized version of Apuleius' ''The Golden Ass'' (rather than a translation of it), it is written in terza rima. It also concerns the theme of metamorphosis, and contains grotesque and allegorical episodes. In the poem, the author meets a beautiful herdswoman surrounded by Circe's herd of beasts (Canto 2). After spending a night of love with him, she explains the characteristics of the animals in her charge: the lions are the brave, the bears are the violent, the wolves are those forever dissatisfied, and so on (Canto 6). In Canto 7 he is introduced to those who experience frustration: a cat that has allowed its prey to escape; an agitated dragon; a fox constantly on the look-out for traps; a dog that bays the moon; Aesop's lion in love that allowed himself to be deprived of ...
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English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8 ...
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Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably mor ...
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Unfinished Poems
Unfinished may refer to: *Unfinished creative work, a work which a creator either chose not to finish or was prevented from finishing. Music * Symphony No. 8 (Schubert) "Unfinished" * ''Unfinished'' (album), 2011 album by American singer Jordan Knight * "Unfinished" (Kotoko song), stylized "→unfinished→", 2012 * "Unfinished" (Mandisa song), 2017 * "Unfinished", song by Stone Sour from the 2010 album ''Audio Secrecy'' * "Unfinished", song by Mineral from the 1998 album ''EndSerenading'' Television and film * "Unfinished" (''How I Met Your Mother''), 2010 television show episode * ''Unfinished'' (film), 2018 South Korean film Literature * ''Unfinished'' (book), a 2021 memoir by Priyanka Chopra See also * * Unfinished symphony * Unfinished building An unfinished building is a building (or other architectural structure, as a bridge, a road or a tower) where construction work was abandoned or on-hold at some stage or only exists as a design. It may also refer to bu ...
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1517 Poems
Year 1517 ( MDXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events January–June * January 22 – Battle of Ridaniya: The Holy Ottoman army of the sultan Selim I defeat the Mamluk army in Egypt, under Tuman bay II. * February 3 – Cairo is captured by the Ottoman Empire, and the Mamluk Sultanate falls. * March 16 – The Fifth Council of the Lateran ends. * May 1 – Evil May Day: Xenophobic riots break out in London. July–December * August 15 – Portuguese merchant Fernão Pires de Andrade meets Ming Dynasty Chinese officials through an interpreter, at the Pearl River estuary and lands, at what is now in the jurisdiction of Hong Kong. Although the first European trade expeditions to China took place in 1513 and 1516 by Jorge Álvares and Rafael Perestrello, respectively, Andrade's mission is the first official diplomatic mission of a European power to China, commissioned b ...
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Chicago University
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the best universities in the world and it is among the most selective in the United States. The university is composed of an undergraduate college and five graduate research divisions, which contain all of the university's graduate programs and interdisciplinary committees. Chicago has eight professional schools: the Law School, the Booth School of Business, the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, the Harris School of Public Policy, the Divinity School, the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. The university has additional campuses and centers in London, Paris, Beijing, Delhi, and Hong Kong, as well as in downtown ...
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Loeb Classical Library
The Loeb Classical Library (LCL; named after James Loeb; , ) is a series of books originally published by Heinemann in London, but is currently published by Harvard University Press. The library contains important works of ancient Greek and Latin literature designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each left-hand page, and a fairly literal translation on the facing page. The General Editor is Jeffrey Henderson, holder of the William Goodwin Aurelio Professorship of Greek Language and Literature at Boston University. History The Loeb Classical Library was conceived and initially funded by the Jewish-German-American banker and philanthropist James Loeb (1867–1933). The first volumes were edited by Thomas Ethelbert Page, W. H. D. Rouse, and Edward Capps, and published by William Heinemann, Ltd. (London) in 1912, already in their distinctive green (for Greek text) and red (for Latin) hardcover ...
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Plutarch
Plutarch (; grc-gre, Πλούταρχος, ''Ploútarchos''; ; – after AD 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his '' Parallel Lives'', a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and '' Moralia'', a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (). Life Early life Plutarch was born to a prominent family in the small town of Chaeronea, about east of Delphi, in the Greek region of Boeotia. His family was long established in the town; his father was named Autobulus and his grandfather was named Lamprias. His name is derived from Pluto (πλοῦτον), an epithet of Hades, and Archos (ἀρχός) meaning "Master", the whole name meaning something like "Whose master is Pluto". His brothers, Timon and Lamprias, are frequently mentioned in his essays and dialogue ...
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The Lion In Love (fable)
The Lion in Love is a cautionary tale of Greek origin which was counted among Aesop's Fables and is numbered 140 in the Perry Index. Its present title is a translation of the one given by Jean de la Fontaine after he retold it in his La Fontaine's Fables, fables. Since then it has been treated frequently by artists. It has also acquired idiomatic force and as such has been used as the title of several literary works. The fable and its interpretation A lion falls in love with a peasant's daughter and asks the father's permission to marry her. Unwilling to refuse outright, the man sets the condition that the animal should first have its claws clipped and its teeth filed. When the lion complies, the man clubs it to death, or in milder accounts simply drives it away, since it now can no longer defend itself. Though the story was included in early collections of Aesop's fables, including those of Babrius and Aphthonius of Antioch, its earliest relation is as part of a war leader's sp ...
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Circe
Circe (; grc, , ) is an enchantress and a minor goddess in ancient Greek mythology and religion. She is either a daughter of the Titan Helios and the Oceanid nymph Perse or the goddess Hecate and Aeëtes. Circe was renowned for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs. Through the use of these and a magic wand or staff, she would transform her enemies, or those who offended her, into animals. The best known of her legends is told in Homer's ''Odyssey'' when Odysseus visits her island of Aeaea on the way back from the Trojan War and she changes most of his crew into swine. He manages to persuade her to return them to human shape, lives with her for a year and has sons by her, including Latinus and Telegonus. Her ability to change others into animals is further highlighted by the story of Picus, an Italian king whom she turns into a woodpecker for resisting her advances. Another story tells of her falling in love with the sea-god Glaucus, who prefers the nymph Sc ...
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Satire
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or exposing the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. A feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm —"in satire, irony is militant", according to literary critic Northrop Frye— but parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are all frequently used in satirical speech and writing. This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to approve of (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to question. Satire is found in many a ...
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Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops including birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. Some insects, fish, amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, cnidarians, echinoderms, and tunicates undergo metamorphosis, which is often accompanied by a change of nutrition source or behavior. Animals can be divided into species that undergo complete metamorphosis (" holometaboly"), incomplete metamorphosis (" hemimetaboly"), or no metamorphosis (" ametaboly"). Scientific usage of the term is technically precise, and it is not applied to general aspects of cell growth, including rapid growth spurts. Generally organisms with a larva stage undergo metamorphosis, and during metamorphosis the organism loses larval characteristics. References to "metamorphosis" in mammals are imprecise and only colloquial, but historically idealist ideas of transformatio ...
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Terza Rima
''Terza rima'' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows (''aba bcb cdc''). The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet (''yzy z'' or ''yzy zz''). ''Terza rima'' was invented early in the fourteenth century by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri for his narrative poem the ''Divine Comedy'', which he set in hendecasyllabic lines. In English, poets often use iambic pentameter. ''Terza rima'' is a challenging form for a poet, and it did not become common in the century following its invention. The form is especially challenging in languages that are inherently less rich in rhymes than Italian. ''Terza rima'' can g ...
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