In Roman mythology,
Janus
is the god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings, endings and time. Most
often he is depicted as having two heads, facing opposite directions;
one head looks back at the last year while the other looks forward to
the new, simultaneously into the future and the past.
Janus was usually depicted with two heads facing in opposite
directions. According to a legend, he had received the gift to see both
future and past from the god
Saturn in reward for the hospitality
received. Janus-like heads of gods related to
Hermes have been found in Greece,
perhaps suggesting a compound god.
The Romans associated Janus with the
Etruscan deity
Ani. Several scholars suggest that he
was likely the most important god in the Roman archaic pantheon.
He was often invoked together with Iuppiter (Jupiter).
According to
Macrobius and
Cicero, Janus and Jana (Diana)
are a pair of divinities, worshipped as the
sun and
moon, whence they were regarded as the
highest of the gods, and received their sacrifices before all the
others.
In general, Janus was the patron of concrete and abstract beginnings
of the world (such as the religion and the gods themselves), the human
life, new historical ages, and economical enterprises. He was also the
god of the home entrance (ianua), gates, bridges and covered and
arcaded passages (iani) named after him.
He was frequently used to symbolize change and transitions such as
the progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one
vision to another, the growing up of young people, and of one universe
to another. He was also known as the figure representing time because he
could see into the past with one face and into the future with the
other. Hence, Janus was worshipped at the beginnings of the harvest and
planting times, as well as marriages, deaths and other beginnings. He
was representative of the middle ground between barbarity and
civilization, rural country and urban cities, and youth and adulthood.
Numa in his regulation of the
Roman calendar called the first month
Januarius after Janus, at the time
the highest divinity. Numa also introduced the
Ianus geminus (also Janus
Bifrons, Janus Quirinus or Portae Belli) , a passage
ritually opened at times of war, and shut again when Roman arms rested.
It formed a walled enclosure with gates at each end, situated in the
Roman Forum which had been consecrated
by
Numa Pompilius. In the course of wars,
the gates of the Janus were opened, and in its interior sacrifices and
vaticinia were held to forecast the outcome of military deeds.
The doors were closed only during peacetime, an extremely rare event.
Livy wrote in his
Ab urbe condita that the doors of
the temple had only been closed twice since the reign of Numa: firstly
in 235 BC after the
first Punic war and secondly in after
the
battle of Actium in 31 BC. A temple of
Janus is said to have been consecrated by the consul
Gaius Duilius in 260 BCE after the
Battle of Mylae in the Forum Holitorium.
The four-side structure known as the
Arch of Janus in the
Forum Boarium dates to the 4th century
CE.
In the Middle Ages, Janus was also taken as the symbol of
Genoa, whose Latin name was Ianua,
as well as of other European communes.
In
Greek mythology, a centaur (from
Ancient Greek:
Κένταυροι –
Kéntauroi) or hippocentaur is a member of a composite race of
creatures, part
human and part
horse. In early
Attic and
Boeotian
vase-paintings (see
below), they are depicted with the
hindquarters of a horse attached to them; in later renderings centaurs
are given the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse's
withers, where the horse's neck would
be.
This half-human and half-animal composition has led many writers to
treat them as
liminal beings, caught between the two
natures, embodied in contrasted myths, both as the embodiment of untamed
nature, as in their battle with the
Lapiths, or conversely as teachers,
like
Chiron.
The centaurs were usually said to have been born of
Ixion and
Nephele (the cloud made in the image of
Hera). Another version, however, makes
them children of a certain
Centaurus, who mated with the
Magnesian mares. This Centaurus was
either himself the son of Ixion and Nephele (inserting an additional
generation) or of
Apollo and
Stilbe, daughter of the river god
Peneus. In the later version of the
story his twin brother was
Lapithus, ancestor of the
Lapiths, thus making the two warring
peoples cousins.
Centaurs were said to have inhabited the region of Magnesia and Mount
Pelion in
Thessaly, the
Foloi oak forest in
Elis, and the Malean peninsula in
southern
Laconia.
Centaurs continued to figure in literary forms of
Roman mythology. A pair of them draw
the chariot of
Constantine the Great and his family in
the
Great Cameo of Constantine (c314-16),
which embodies wholly pagan imagery.
The city Thessalonica in Macedonia was founded
around
315 BC by the
King Cassander of Macedon, on or near
the site of the ancient town of
Therma and twenty-six other local
villages. He named it after his wife
Thessalonike, a half-sister of
Alexander the Great. She gained her
name ("victory of Thessalians": Gk
nikē "victory") from her father,
Philip II, to commemorate her birth on
the day of his gaining a victory over the
Phocians, who were defeated with the
help of
Thessalian horsemen, the best in Greece
at that time. Thessaloniki developed rapidly and as early as the
2nd century BC the first walls were
built, forming a large square. It was an autonomous part of the Kingdom
of
Macedon, with its own parliament where
the King was represented and could interfere in the city's domestic
affairs.
Roman
era
After the fall of the kingdom of Macedon in
168 BC, Thessalonica became a city of
the
Roman Republic. It grew to be an
important trade-hub located on the
Via Egnatia, the
Roman road connecting
Byzantium (later
Constantinople), with
Dyrrhachium (now
Durrës in
Albania), and facilitating trade
between Europe and Asia. The city became the capital of one of the four
Roman districts of Macedonia; it kept its privileges but was ruled by a
praetor and had a Roman garrison, while
for a short time in the
1st century BC, all the Greek provinces
came under Thessalonica (the Latin form of the name). Due to the city's
key commercial importance, a spacious harbour was built by the Romans,
the famous Burrowed Harbour (Σκαπτός Λιμήν) that accommodated the
town's trade up to the eighteenth century; later, with the help of silt
deposits from the river
Axios, it was reclaimed as land and the
port built beyond it. Remnants of the old harbour's docks can be found
in the present day under Odos Frangon Street, near the Catholic Church.
Thessaloniki's
acropolis, located in the northern
hills, was built in
55 BC after
Thracian raids in the city's outskirts,
for security reasons.
The city had a
Jewish colony, established during the
first century, and was to be an early
centre of
Christianity. On his second missionary
journey,
Paul
of Tarsus, born a Hellenized Israelite,
preached in the city's synagogue, the chief synagogue of the Jews in
that part of Thessaloniki, and laid the foundations of a church. Other
Jews opposed to Paul drove him from the city, and he fled to
Veroia. Paul wrote two of his
epistles to the Christian community at
Thessalonica, the
First Epistle to the Thessalonians and
the
Second Epistle to the Thessalonians.
Thessaloníki acquired a patron saint,
St. Demetrius, in 306. He is credited
with a number of miracles that saved the city, and was the Roman
Proconsul of Greece under the
anti-Christian emperor
Maximian, later martyred at a Roman
prison where today lies the
Church of St. Demetrius, first built by
the Roman sub-prefect of
Illyricum Leontios in 463. Other
important remains from this period include the
Arch and Tomb of Galerius, located near
the centre of the modern city.
