Anactoria is a woman mentioned in the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho (pictured), who wrote in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE. Sappho names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16. Another of her poems, fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", although no name appears in it. As portrayed by Sappho, Anactoria is likely to have been an aristocratic follower of hers, of marriageable age. The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Anactoria" was published in 1866 and is written from the point of view of Sappho, who expresses her lust for Anactoria in a long, sexually explicit monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. Swinburne's poem created a sensation by openly approaching then-taboo topics such as lesbianism and dystheism. Anactoria later featured in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria" by Robert Lowell.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anactoria

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1897:

Ranavalona III, the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranavalona_III

1928:

Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his colleagues discovered what is now known as Raman scattering, for which he later became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Raman

1975:

A London Underground train failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorgate_tube_crash

2002:

During a period of religious violence in Gujarat, India, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims in Naroda Patiya and in Chamanpura, resulting in 166 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulbarg_Society_massacre

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

24-hour clock: A timekeeping convention in which the 24 hours of the day are treated as a single period rather than two sets of 12 hours, with the result that midnight is indicated as 00:00 (or sometimes 24:00), and the hours from 1:00 to 11:00 p.m. as 13:00 to 23:00. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/24-hour_clock

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.   --Michel de Montaigne https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne