Hey, in that last post I didn't mean to drag Caracalla into the American founding!

As I keep saying, this blog engages in satire, and occasionally I like to take poetic/historic license....

But I guess, I ought to balance the klassical karma, by dragging the founding fathers of this country back to the classical era of which they were so fond.

I have long argued that this country was founded on classical values.

And today, I offer some graphic evidence that I am not alone in my belief! Since 1895, Benjamin Franklin has been shown offering olive branches to young athletes in a remarkably accurate imitation of Olympian rites:

If that didn't convince you that America was indeed built on ancient rites, check out these cool web sites!

(OK, now who's gonna get serious around here?)

UPDATE, IN THE INTEREST OF TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE ACCURACY: Um, I guess I missed some cool memorabilia.

And in my haste to snap and post a photo, I failed to research the background of what it was, and so I missed this description of the plaque itself:

The design for the Penn Relays plaque and medal was executed by Dr. R. Tait McKenzie in time for the 1925 meet. It shows Benjamin Franklin, founder of the University, seated in a chair modeled from his library chair, holding a laurel sprig in his left hand. He greets four runners, shaking the hand of the first, while the last holds a baton. Posing for the medal were former Penn athletes Larry Brown, Louis Madeira, George Orton and Ted Meredith. At the bottom of the relief is a lightning bolt, symbolic of Franklin's explorations in the nature of electricity.

And what about the issue of olive versus laurel? Frankly, I'm not enough of a botanist to know which it is, but I would remind serious classical scholars of the Olympian significance of both:

The laurel (Laurus nobilis) contains, in fact, nothing that chemically would be active in inducing such prophetic seizures: it is purely a symbolic commemoration of the entheogens that once figured back in his homelands. Like Athena's olive, the daphne has Hyperborean associations, supposedly first transplanted by Apollo into the Mediterranean world via Thessaly; and like the olive, it is a surrogate for Aminita, the Indo-European sacred mushroom. But like the woinos of Dionysus, it also had Minoan antecedents: for Apollo, these included, as we have already seen, the Dirke Datura and the Lykos wolfsbane. In the assimilation of the two traditions of shamanism, the hysterical shrieks of Apollo's tormented brides became interpreted, not as a message from the chthonic underworld of the Goddess, but a clue to comprehending the mind of Zeus, himself. The fact that the possession was purely spiritual now, without any chemical inducement, made it even more appropriate to the aspirations of Olympian shamanism.

And peace, which the ancients recognized as often related to victory in war. Today, however, slogans such as

PEACE IS VICTORY!

or

VICTORY IS PEACE!

might be misinterpreted by either "side" depending on context.