Dates, Names, and Faces

As befits an aging lady, Cliopatria let her 2nd birthday on Saturday 3 December go unnoticed. On 3 December 2003, Welcome to My World"transblogrified" when Tim Burke, Oscar Chamberlain, and KC Johnson joined me to launch Cliopatria. Jon Dresner joined us soon thereafter and, with the addition of extraordinarily talented others, our number has grown substantially. Here's the original explanation of her name:

Our name, with its allusions, is found in James Joyce's Finnegin's Wake. As with much else in Finnegans Wake, however, I'm not sure what it is doing there.

Our name vaguely recalls the memory of Cleopatra, her beauty, her mystery, and her contingent power. More directly, it invokes the name of Clio, one of the nine muses in Greek mythology. Clio the Proclaimer was the muse of history, who was credited with bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. She is often depicted in western art with a scroll and a small library of books. In his work for the Spectator, Joseph Addison, who perfected the essay and pioneered the novel as English literary forms, used her name as a pseudonym. The Latinate patria would refer to one's place of origin, a father's home or a native land. We speak from and of history as our place of beginnings, in which we act, through which we move, and to which we owe some allegiance. As a word of both Greek and Latin roots, to say nothing of the Egyptian allusion, Cliopatria is also a barbaric hybrid. It suggests the plurality of our origins and degrees of alienation. We are not obliged to agree with, only to listen carefully and respectfully to, each other.

We've gotten better at that last part of it. Cliopatria didn't even have a face until The Cliopatria Awards forced the issue. Happy 2nd birthday, ol' girl!