Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (69 page)

Mercury:
Messenger of the gods, also known as Hermes, and the god of commerce. Mercury guided mortals such as Orpheus and Dante in their descents into Hades.

Minerva:
Roman goddess of wisdom, medicine, and the arts, but also of war.

Mitre, Bartolomé:
(Argentina; 1821-1906) Statesman, general, historian, intellectual. As a young man, Mitre earned the hatred of perennial dictator Juan Manuel Rosas and went into exile in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, but he returned in 1852 and took part in the overthrow of Rosas led by Urquiza. Mitre opposed joining Buenos Aires to the new Republic of Argentina, but in 1859 Mitre’s troops were defeated by Urquiza’s and Buenos Aires was, indeed, made part of the nation. Mitre became governor of the Buenos Aires province in 1860 and the next year became president of the republic. In 1870, he founded the important newspaper
La Nación.
In 1874 and again in 1891 he was defeated in runs for the presidency. He left many historical writings, among them the
Historia de
Belgrano y de la independencia argentina
(1857; 1876-77) and the
Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudamericana
(1887-1890).

Moctezuma:
(1466-1520) Aztec emperor during the invasion by Spain.

Montagne Pelée:
A volcano in Martinique, also known as Mont Pelée, which erupted disastrously in 1902, killing some thirty thousand people. Only two persons are known to have survived. The town of Saint Pierre, once called “Little Paris,” was now called the West Indian Pompeii.

Moréas, Jean:
(b. Athens, naturalized French; 1856-1910) Original name: Iannis Papadiamantopoulos. Moréas went to Paris in 1872, at the age of sixteen. He wrote two volumes of Symbolist verse,
Les Syrtes
(1884) and
Le Pèlerin passionné
(1891). With the publication of
Enone au clair visage
(1894) and
Eriphyle
(1894) Moréas returned to classical style, and in
Les Stances
(1899-1901) and his play
Iphigénie
(1903) he clearly reacted against the new movements in poetry.

Mucha, Alphonse:
(1860-1939) Born in Moravia (part of later Czechoslovakia), Mucha went to Paris at age seventeen, where he studied for a while, then lived the life (literally) of a starving artist in a garret. In 1895, having created a poster for a play starring the legendary Sarah Bernhardt, he presented his “Art Nouveau” to the Paris public. The poster,
Gismonda,
is one of the most famous posters in history, making both him and Bernhardt icons. He was immensely successful, but always considered his success as for Czechoslovakia, not so much for Paris. Later in life, his
nouveau
art was not so new, and so he fell out of favor, although he was still important enough to be arrested by the Gestapo when they invaded Prague in 1939. Having been subjected to an interrogation and then released, Mucha died at his home some hours later.

Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban:
(Spain; 1617/18-1682) The leading painter in Seville after Velázquez went to Madrid in 1623. A painter of religious subjects, especially Madonnas and Immaculate Conceptions, in a “warm style,” which was followed by a “vaporous style”; his later works, most famously of street urchins, are characterized by a high degree of sentimentalism.

Myron:
Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary
has the following charming entry on Myron: “A celebrated sculptor of Greece, peculiarly happy in imitating nature. His statue of the Discobolus, a youth throwing the discus, is famous; and he also made a cow so much resembling life, that even bulls were deceived and approached her as if alive, as is frequently mentioned by many epigrams in the [Greek] Anthology. He flourished about 442 years before Christ.”

Nakens, José:
(1841-1926) Spanish journalist, fanatically republican and anticlerical. To combat the Restoration and the influence of the Church in Spanish politics and life generally, in 1881 Nakens established a newspaper,
El Motin
(
The Riot
), which he used to attack all those whom he saw as standing in the way of Spain’s return to Republicanism. Indeed, Nakens stated that he sought “a Republic brought forth by force—bloody, hard, avenging,” though he never found the man to lead that entity. When the Conservatives came to power, Nakens became their fiercest enemy: over a period of two years, 84 actions were brought against his newspaper for various crimes relating to publishing; its editors were jailed several times; and Nakens himself and others were hit by a total of 17 excommunications issued by various bishops. Due to Nakens’ fanaticism, the newspaper fell on hard times; it hardly sold on the street, and there were but a handful of subscribers; Nakens, however, blamed the Republicans, whom he saw as never sufficiently hard-line. (That is, he attacked his allies as ferociously as he did his enemies.) Nakens was involved in (some say framed for) the attempted assassination of Alfonso XIII in 1906 (in the least incriminating of the versions of the story he sheltered the young man who planted the bomb) and was sent to prison for two years. This “martyrdom” helped newspaper sales enormously, which skyrocketed to some twenty thousand copies per issue. Subsequently, the newspaper had a number of vicissitudes, but Nakens died at last without much recognition as a creator of the modern state of Spain; his views were simply too harsh, invective-laden, and alienating to be useful in any political way.

Nebuchadnezzar:
(?-562 B.C.) King of Babylonia who conquered Jerusalem after Zedekiah had entered into an alliance with Egypt, against the advice of his prophet. Zedekiah was captured, blinded, and imprisoned for life.

Nemea:
An upland valley in central Greece, near the Gulf of Corinth.

Nephelibata:
Cloud-walker (Greek).

Nero (Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus):
(Rome; 37-68 A.D.) Nero’s mother, Agrippina (the younger), was the daughter of Caesar Germanicus and the sister of madman-emperor Caligula, who banished the family. Upon Caligula’s death, Agrippina was recalled from exile and later she married her uncle, the emperor Claudius, and persuaded him to adopt Nero, whose name, originally
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,
was changed to reflect his new status. Nero was educated by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and at the age of twenty-one, in 58 A.D., he married Claudius’ daughter, his adoptive sister, Octavia. After Agripinna poisoned Claudius in 54, Nero became emperor. For the first five years of his rule, he was an exemplary ruler, abolishing capital punishment, outlawing bloodshed in the gladiatorial games, reducing taxes, and allowing slaves to take abusive masters to court. He was a patron of the arts and sponsored poetry competitions. In 59, however, he had his mother murdered (after several attempts to poison and strangle her, he finally managed to have her stabbed to death), and in 62 he divorced his wife to marry Poppaea Sabina, his mistress. These were the omens of the remainder of his rule, which was marked by cruelty, outrageous excess, and a hatred of Christians and Christianity. When Rome burned, in 64, he blamed the Christians, and ordered many killed in horrendous ways. In 65, he kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death because she had scolded him for coming home late, and a year later he married another woman, whose husband had just been murdered. In 66, he took the boy SPORUS as his lover, supposedly because of his resemblance to Poppaea. By this time, Nero’s excesses were about to catch up with him; his enemies both in the Senate and among the general population were growing in number and strength. Finally, even his Praetorian guard turned on him, and the Senate sentenced him to death. In 68, he fled Rome, but eventually committed suicide. His last words are reputed to have been “What an artist the world loses in me.”

Netzahualcóyotl:
(1402-1472) According to Miguel León-Portilla, Netzahuacóyotl of Texcoco was born in the year One-Rabbit and died in the year Six-Flint. As a ruler in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, he is known as a poet, architect, legislator, and
tlamatini
(one who knows). In keeping with Nahuatl thought, his poem/songs are like flowers, meditations on human transience and permanence.

Nicarao:
The indigenous leader who had a famous, sophisticated philosophical dialogue with the Spanish conquistador Gil González Dávila on the shores of Nicaragua’s Gran Lago in April, 1523.

Nietzsche, Friedrich:
(Germany; 1844-1900) Philosopher now perhaps most famous for his theory of the
“Übermensch,”
or superman, which he developed in
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
His work
Beyond Good and Evil
attempts, as does all his work, to go beyond the rational to the irrational. He rejected Christianity (“God is dead”), and was concerned with teaching people how to live in this world rather than prepare for the next. His values, then, were based on “survival,” one might say, and he exalted the will to power, along with strength and “virility.” These ideas (the race of supermen that would inherit the earth, the notion that “might makes right,” etc.) strongly influenced German thought in World War I and the theories of Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. He was insane for the last twelve years of his life.

Nimrod:
One of the greatest warriors and city-builders of the ancient world. From the cities he founded, Babylon and Nineveh, the Babylonians and Assyrians went on to conquer Israel.

Nodier, Charles:
(1788-1840) A French Romantic novelist to whom such luminaries as VICTOR HUGO, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve recognized a debt, Nodier wrote fantastical novels and stories, including some about vampires, ghosts, and fairies (not necessarily all in the same work).

Nordau, Max:
(1849-1923) Nordau (born Simon Maximilian Suedfeld) was an early Zionist. Attracted by Theodor Herzl’s idea for a Jewish state, Nordau labored to found the World Zionist Organization. He achieved fame as a thinker and social critic with the publication of several volumes highly critical of society, religion, government, art, and literature. His works aroused much controversy and continued to be studied and discussed many years after their first appearance. Among his most famous publications are
The
Conventional Lies of Our Civilization
(1883),
Paradoxes
(1896), and
Degeneration
(1895). He was a favorite of the authors of
Modernismo.

Numa:
Lemprière comes once more to our assistance: “Numa Pompilius, a celebrated philosopher, born at Cures, a village of the Sabines, on the day that Romulus laid the foundation of Rome. He married Tatia, the daughter of Tatius the king of the Sabines, and at her death he retired into the country to devote himself more freely to literary pursuits. At the death of Romulus, the Romans fixed upon him to be their new king, and two senators were sent to acquaint him with the decisions of the senate and of the people. Numa refused their offers, and it was only at the repeated solicitations and prayers of his friends that he was prevailed upon to accept the royalty. The beginning of his reign was popular, and he dismissed the 300 bodyguards that his predecessor had kept around his person, observing that he did not distrust a people who had compelled him to reign over them. He was not, like Romulus, fond of war and military expeditions, but instead applied himself to tame the ferocity of his subjects, to inculcate in their minds a reverence for the Deity, and to quell their dissensions by dividing all the citizens into different classes. He established different orders of priests and taught the Romans not to worship the Deity in images, and from his example no graven or painted statues appeared in the temples or sanctuaries of Rome for upwards of 160 years.
He encouraged the report which was spread of his paying regular visits to the nymph Egeria, and made use of her name to give sanction to the laws and institutions which he had introduced
. He established the college of the vestals, and told the Romans that the safety of the empire depended upon the preservation of the sacred
ancile
or
shield
which, as was generally believed, had dropped down from heaven. He dedicated a temple to Janus, which, during his whole reign, remained shut, as a mark of peace and tranquillity at Rome. Numa died after a reign of 43 years, in which he had given every possible encouragement to the useful arts, and in which he had cultivated peace, 672 B.C.” (Emphasis added.)

Numen:
In Roman mythology, one of a specific list of gods and spirits. Cupid, Janus, Priapus, and Terminus were Numens.

Núñez de Arce, Gaspar:
(Spain; 1832-1903) Poet, playwright, and journalist, Núñez was sent to cover Spain’s African campaign in 1859-60 and became a politician when he returned. In the 1870s he turned to poetry, becoming one of Spain’s leading poets. He wrote of social problems and religious doubts.

Nuño, Alfonso:
(d. 1143) Nuño distinguished himself in successful battles against the Moors in twelfth-century Spain, near Toledo. He built a castle there which he called San Servantes (Cervantes).

Oceanides:
Sea nymphs. Lemprière has the following entry: “Daughters of Oceanus, from whom they received their name, and the goddess Tethys. They were 3000 according to Apollodorus, who mentions the name of 7 of them. . . . Hesiod speaks of them, and reckons 41. . . . The Oceanides, like the rest of the inferior deities, were honoured with libations and sacrifices. Prayers were offered to them, and they were entreated to protect sailors from storms and dangerous tempests. The Argonauts, before they proceeded on their expedition, made an offering of flour, honey, and oil, on the seashore, to all the deities of the sea, and sacrificed bulls to them, and entreated their protection.”

Oexmelin, Alexandre Olivier:
(France; ca. 1645-ca. 1707) (Last name also given as Exquemeling, Esquemeling.) Author, as Darío notes, of a history of piracy:
Les aventuriers et les bucaniers d’Amérique.

Ohnet, Georges:
(France; 1848-1916) French novelist, admirer of Georges Sand and opposed to realism in the modern novel.