Cynisca

Mortal Sightings:

David Stafford had one through his alter ego Jimson, (he of the24 to 48 hour anticholinergic delirium) all arranged by The Red Giraffe on an unexpected visit to Goya.

It went something like this:

“When Jimson first saw her he turned to see if Lemke (off the mail belt asteroid) also saw her but he was fiddling with the straps on his backpack .  He wheeled round.  She was still there.

“What a lovely mirage,” he thought to himself.  She did in fact resemble a girl he had once met at a party - not the woman he married, but a stranger whose face had stayed with him.  Now it hovered above him, as impassive as a sphinx, the face pulsating, a frenzied tangle of seething rivulets.  Her face was water, Blue, cool.

He could feel the breeze coming across the desert like a kiss, a benediction as though he was walking along a shady creek.   Lemke grabbed his arm.

“What ever you’re seeing pal…shes’s not there”.

BUT SHE WAS! 

She was a Spartan woman who broke into the most male of Greek arenas during this period: the Olympic games. Cynisca, the sister of one of the Spartan kings, entered her own chariot team in 396 and 392 BC. She won both times, becoming the first female to win the Olympic games (albeit by proxy) in its 400-year history. Pausanias, the ancient traveller and first ‘guide book’ writer, saw the victory monument erected by Cynisca at Olympia to commemorate her success still standing 500 years later.

The monument simply stated:

 My fathers and brothers were Spartan kings, I won with a team of fast-footed horses, and put up this monument, I am Cynisca: I say I am the only woman in all Greece to have won this wreath.

Pausanias, as mentioned before was a careful, pedestrian  writer, he was interested not only in the grandiose or the exquisite but in unusual sights and obscure ritual.  He is occasionally careless, or makes unwarranted inferences, and his guides or even his own notes sometimes mislead him; yet his honesty is unquestionable, and his value without par. In the topographical part of his work, Pausanias is fond of digressions on the wonders of nature, the signs that herald the approach  of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north, and the noonday sun which at the  summer solstice casts no shadow at Syene.

Pausanias, was given a key by Cynisca which was lodged years later in the Needle of Hatshepsut.  But more about that later.  Suffice it to say, now you know that Cynisca is a Bhubezi Woman and that David Stafford really saw her.