The story of the Arsenal mural has drifted, over the years, into something more closely resembling a myth. What should be straightforward details are now shrouded in fog, tangled by apocrypha.
[In] 36a we read that there was (19) a geis upon ships to leave the 'port' of Athens till someone had defeated Atalanta in a running race. The nature and function of the geis that lay upon objects appears to better advantage, however, in one of the stories about Ailill Dock-Ear.
The Sicilian Hellenistic inscriptions, and especially the public ones, show a highly standardized language, which can be called Sicilian Doric koina. The Sicilian Doric koina was similar to other Doric koinas such as the koina of Rhodes, of the Achaean League, of north-western Greece, which were also especially used for public purposes. The existence of these Doric koinas is usually taken to indicate the resilience of the Doric-speaking areas to the encroachment of the Attic-based koine.
When Mikhail Sokolov signed up to work for the FSB security services, he never imagined his journey would end here: in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of a sleepy town in the rural Netherlands.
