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 As Euripides puts it in
the Bacchai, "Himself a God, he is poured out to the
other Gods, so that from him we mortals have what's good
in life." (332-35) |
Pentheus in Art |
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“Now he is the
lord of all living creatures who drives them to kill and in the
death of the slain is so reduced that he is in need of
awakening. Dionysos is the quarry of the hunt and the
sacrificial animal, both of whom are eaten raw . . .”
Karl Kerenyi
(203). |
A filmed adaptation of
Euripides' The Bacchae, written and directed by Brad Mays,
has had distribution issues since its completion in 2002. [it
wrapped on October 3rd, 2000]There
was a web rumor of major distribution
release set for 2005 but this appears to not have happened.
A theatrical adaptation set in modern times
has also been written by the playwright
Chuck Mee, titled The Bacchae 2.1. |
imdb.com/thebacchae |
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"Appear, appear,
whatso they shape or name, O Mountain Bull, Snake of
the Hundred Heads, Lion of the Burning Flame! O God,
Beast, Mystery, come!" |
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"Where shall we
tread the dance, tossing our white heads in the
dances of the god? |
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The Bacchae won
the play competition of 404BC, but its author Euripides of
Salamis had died of old age in exile two years before. The
play uses a foreign name from Asia Minor for the deity and
it tells of his arrival at the city of Thebes in Boeotia,
not far north of Athens.
This is Dionysus
birthplace and Thebes is now ruled by his cousin, Pentheus.
Pentheus was angry at the women of Thebes, including his mother, Agave,
for denying his divinity and worshipping Dionysus against
his will.
From Lydia have I come and
Phrygia
The golden lands
From sun-drenched plains in Persia
From the walled cities of Baktria
From the dreaded land of Media
And I have passed through the whole of happy Arabia
and all of Asia Minor's coast |
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In this
play, Dionysus comes to Thebes to avenge the wrongs he feels
he has suffered - his mother's own sisters have spread the
tale that Semele lied about being impregnated by a god. This
means that they also reject Dionysus' godhood.
The opening song of the chorus of Lydian and Phrygian
women, dancing in honor of Dionysos.

Oh how lucky you are, how
really lucky you are,
if you know the gods from within,
if you're for clean living,
if you get the feel of Bacchus
and you do it in the hills
pure in your soul,
and to sit in on the orgies
of Great Mother Cybele,
to share a wand in the air,
to wear ivy on your head,
to serve Dionysus, how lucky you are!
Go Bacchae! oh go Bacchae! |
Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of
these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you
choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his
nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of
Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as
his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering
mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it
oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other
medicine for misery. |
Oh, Thebes, nurse of Semele, crown your
hair with ivy! Grow green with bryony! Redden
with berries! O city, with boughs of oak and
fir, come dance the dance of god! Fringe your
skins of dappled fawn
with tufts of twisted
wool! Handle with holy care the violent wand of
god! And let the dance begin! He is Bromius who
runs to the mountain! To the mountain! Where the
throng of women waits, driven from shuttle and
loom, possessed by Dionysos!
Euripidies, The Bacchae,
trans. Richmond Lattimore
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Bloom, blossom everywhere
With flowers and fruitage fair,
And let your frenzied steps
supported be
With thyrsi from the oak
Or the green ash-tree broke:
Your spotted fawn-skins line with
locks
Torn from the snowy fleecéd flocks:
Shaking his wanton wand let each
advance,
And all the land shall madden with
the dance.
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"I behold Teiresias the Seer
in dappled fawn-skins arrayed, and likewise, moving
me to laughter, my mother's father flourishing the
wand of Baccheus!" |
One grasped her thyrsus
staff, and smote the rock,
And forth upleapt a fountain's showry spray:
One in earth's bosom planted her reed-wand,
And up there through the god a wine-fount sent:
And whoso fain would drink white-foaming draughts
Scarred with their finger tips the breast of earth,
And milk gushed forth unstinted: dripped the while
Sweet streams of honey from their ivy staves.
The first half of the play, the audience laughs
often. Even Semele's sisters, the mother and aunts of the present
King Pentheus, believe her lover had been a mere mortal. The
King is indignant that the women would dare to ignore their
household duties and go off gallivanting on their own. Dionysus targets the young King Pentheus,
son of Semele's sister Agave, grandson of the former king
Cadmus.
Dionysus tempts the king to go and spy on the women, to watch
"their obscene acts."
Pentheus refuses to accept Dionysus as a god.
Dionysus arranges for Agave, maddened beyond reason, to rip
her own son to shreds, thereby killing two birds with one
stone.
The scene of Pentheus' murder, which takes place off-stage
(as do all violent scenes in Greek tragedy), is chillingly
related by a witness. Agave then arrives with Pentheus' head
impaled on her thyrsus, believing it to be a mountain lion,
her father Cadmus tells her to nail it to the palace wall.
At the end, everyone who is
left alive acknowledges his fault. Pentheus is dead, Agave
and Cadmus are exiled, and the population of Thebes can only
be cleansed by instituting and keeping the rites of
Dionysus. Dionysus leaves Thebes, having meted out his
divine justice.
Euripides’
Bacchae
-
wiki/Euripides,
The Bacchae
-
www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/bacchaebg.html ||
Dionysus and Greek Drama; ||
Dramatic Festivals and Competitions ||Euripides V:
Bacchae;
Background and Images for the
Bacchae;
Study Questions for the
Bacchae
December, 1999 by Barbara F. McManus Well done college level
course outline and text with many photos.
-
Dionysus 2 (from the Genealogical Guide to Greek
Mythology, by Carlos Parada)
-
Dionysos in Western Art
(Mythmedia, University of Haifa)
-
Images of Dionysos
(Laurel Bowman, University of Victoria); see also
Dionysos texts
-
Euripides’ Bacchae
(John Paul Adams, California State Northridge)—outline
of play's structure, additional notes
- “Bacchae
blends new science, ancient drama by Katie Grove (The
Technique, Winter 1998)—describes Georgia Tech
performance of the Bacchae that integrates
multimedia with the drama
- Project Gutenberg
Hippolytus/The
Bacchae [with accents] ,
EuripidesHippolytus/The Bacchae [no accents] ,
Euripides
-
www.dhushara.com/book/diochris/bacch.htm
Genesis of Eden Diversity Encyclopedia
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DIONYSUS IN '69
produced by Brian De Palma
Released by:Sigma
III (1970)Directed
by:Richard Schechner
Director of photography:
Brian De Palma & Robert Fiore |
Hugely inspired by the
ground-breaking theatrical rituals of Polish
director Jerzy Grotowski, DIONYSUS IN '69 (as the
production was named) stirred up huge controversy
amongst New York theatre audiences and critics
alike.
Although the production was directed by Richard
Schechner, Dionysus In '69 was created through a
rehearsal process that was part democracy, part
anarchy, part primal scream therapy. The final
result was more a ritualized confrontation than
conventional play, which culminated in a virtual
orgy of audience participation. Nudity, profanity
and huge amounts of stage blood were used to
tremendous effect.
Brian DePalma discovered the
production and brought two NYU film maker friends of
his into a special performance where multiple 16mm
cameras were used to archive the iconoclastic
proceedings in B&W. The final cut is an exercise in
the "split screen" techniques which would eventually
become DePalma's cinematic trademark.
"My taste for the long
takes was born during DIONYSUS IN '69. Some takes
are almost eight minutes long." Depalma
remarked.
more
at colba.net &
Brian De Palma
by imdb.com |
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This story of a merciless deity has
was used by Christians to vanquish the wide
popularity that Dionysus and his rites enjoyed
centuries past Roman endorsement of Christianity as
the sole official religion. Pagans point out that
the main point of the story, intolerance for lack of
belief, has remained an basic part of both
Christianity and its main rival for adherents,
Muslimism. |
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Aeschylus reminds us that Orpheus voice affected
"All" |
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Aristophanes The Frogs THE FROGS was
probably produced at the Lenaean festival in Athens
in January, 405 B.C. where it took first prize. It
scored such a hit that it was staged a second time,
probably in March of the same year, at the Great
Dionysia. It is typical of the lyrical-burlesques of
Aristophanes.
Dionysus is in Hades and almost at once loud
quarreling is heard. The disturbance turns out to be
Aeschylus and Euripides disputing the place of honor
as King of Tragedy, a position which Aeschylus holds
and Euripides wants. It is finally agreed that since
their plays were written for performance at the
Dionysian festivals, Dionysus shall decide their
dispute.
It is in Aristophanes' The Frogs that we get
the closest look at the comic dimensions of the
god. Lois Spatz points out that in this play
Dionysus is also Iachus, god of mysteries. "It is
he who leads the sacred procession from Athens to
Demeter's shrine at Eleusis." The combination of
the two gods offered to everyone, including women
and slaves, the opportunity to become initiates into
a cult which promised a blessed afterlife. |
Euripides
(c. 480–406 BCE)
was born on Salamis, and
died in Macedonia in 406. Though he was scarcely a generation
younger than Sophocles, his world view better reflects the
political, social, and intellectual crises of late 5th-century
Athens. He was friendly with the philosophers Anaxagoras and
Socrates and with Sophists such as Protagoras and Prodicus, and
his plays reflect contemporary ethics, rhetoric, and science. He
may have been prosecuted for impiety by the demagogue Cleon.
Less reverent than Aeschylus or Sophocles, Euripides criticized
traditional religion and shocked contemporaries by representing
mythical figures as everyday, unheroic people or even as
abnormal or neurotic personalities.
Euripides was one of the three
great tragedians of classical Athens, along with
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides first competed in
the famous Athenian dramatic festival (the Dionysia)
in 455 BCE, one year after the death of Aeschylus.
He came in third. It was not until 441 BCE that he
won first place, and over the course of his
lifetime, Euripides claimed a mere four victories.
Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408
BCE. Although there is a story that he left Athens
embittered because of his defeats, there is no real
evidence to support it. He died in 406 BCE, probably
in Athens or nearby, and not in Macedon, as some
biographers repeatedly state.
Euripides. The Bacchae
The Bacchae was
performed after his death in 405 BCE.
Shortly
after 408 he left Athens for the court of Archelaus, king of
Macedon, and there wrote one his greatest plays, The Bacchae,
the most demonic known work of the ancient Attic theater,
revealing the punishment that the wine god Dionysus visits upon
Thebes and its youthful king, the puritanical Pentheus, for
rejecting his divinity. Euripides advances a bewildering array
of techniques and ideas. Divine, human, animal, and sexual
identities are confused; miracles and distortions of world,
psyche and behavior abound. The Bacchae is the most explicit
expression of Euripides' involvement with the ambiguities,
paradoxes, and deceptions residing in the human condition.
mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/frogs.htm
prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, is in the
public domain
www.eoneill.com/library/essays/larner2.htm |
Heraclitus
of Ephesus (Greek Ἡράκλειτος Herakleitos)
(about 535 - 475 BC), known as 'The Obscure,' was a pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. As with other
pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by
other authors. He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and
Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance and
claimed instead that everything is derived from the Greek
classical element fire, rather than from air, water, or earth.
This led to the belief that change is real, and stability
illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as exemplified
in his famous aphorism "Panta Rhei":
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Heradotus [c.
484-425B.C.] the Father of History 
Herodotus was to make journeys to places like
Asia Minor, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece during his lifetime, and
he wrote about the different people and cultures he met.
It was Herodotus who was the first person to speak about the
idea of the free men of the west against the slaves of the east.
At the age of about 37 he went to Athens, and won the admiration
of many people, including Pericles and his good friend Sophocles.
A few years later he settled in southern Italy, in the Greek
colony Thurii. He was to spent the rest of his life working on
his History, which describes the history and civilization of the
ancient world.
Herodotus tried to achieve objectivity and tried to separate
what he held for true and what he thought was improbable.
He founded the grounds for historiography in trying to draw
moral lessons from various events, showing for example how the
gods punish the arrogant.
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Livy
Titus
Livius
 |
--The
best known evil is the most tolerable.
--Vae
victis! =Woe to the vanquished
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(Titus Livius (around 59 BC - 17 AD), known as Livy
in English, wrote a monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita,
from its founding (traditionally dated to 753 BC). Livy was a
native of Padua on the Po River in northern Italy
Livy's work was originally composed of 142 books,
of which only 35 are extant; these are 1-10, and 21-45 (with
major
lacunae in 40-45).
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Ovid
Actual name was
Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC – Tomis, now
Constanta AD 17) Ovid, the Roman poet wrote on topics of
love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. From
his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most
widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work,
the Metamorphoses.
Ovid
is among the most quotable of early writers: |
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Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the
Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote
that it was because of an error and a carmen – a mistake and a
poem (Tr. 2.207). Likely referring to his publishing the Art
of Love, a treatise that made no careful distinction between
the seduction of citizens' wives and more conventionally
accessible Roman demimondaines.
Even though he was friendly with the natives
of Tomis, a people known as the Scythians. He still pined for
Rome and his beloved third wife. Ovid died at Tomis after nearly
ten years of banishment.
To understand the significance of Ovid, one
has to set him up as a clear foil to Virgil, who was his
contemporary. Virgil is famous for
Rome's national epic the
Aeneid, high nationalist poetry,
as well as his status as Augustus's star artist. Ovid wrote
fragmented, non-linear works like Metamorphoses, The Art of
Love, and The Heroides.
Ovid's work has been remembered fondly as a
testament to the playful and erotically experimental side of
Rome, the feel-good side of the Roman spirit, the comedic genius
of its social life, and of course, the pain of being ultimately
disgraced and shunned for speaking one's mind. Thus Ovidian
sensibility is more transgressive, naughty, bohemian---more
Carnaval like.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid
Latin text with English translation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_%28poem%29
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ovidius.htm
"He had been hailed as the successor to
Virgil, but
lived his last ten years among barbarians, keeping up the hope
of return to Rome. ... The reasons behind the emperor's
decisions are unsolved, but he may have objected to a rumored
affair between Ovid and the emperor's nymphomaniac daughter
Julia." |
"... Praise wine that is old,
but praise the flowers of songs that are new."
[Pindar, Olympian
Odes 9.49] |
Pliny
Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus,
(23–79) better known as Pliny the Elder, was an ancient author
and Natural philosopher of some importance who wrote Naturalis
Historia. He completed a History of his Times in thirty-one
books, possibly extending from the reign of Nero to that of
Vespasian, and deliberately reserved it for publication after
his death. Pliny collected much of the knowledge of his time
into his great work, the Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia.
Pliny was an adherent to the
Stoics. He was also influenced by the Epicurean and
the Academic and the revived Pythagorean schools. But his view
of nature and of God is essentially Stoic. It was only (he
declares) the weakness of humanity that had embodied the Being
of God in many human forms imbued with human faults and vices .
The Godhead was really one; it was the soul of the eternal
world, displaying its beneficence on the earth, as well as in
the sun and stars [penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/
L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/2*.html#154
Pliny the Younger: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (63-ca.
113), better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author
and a natural philosopher of Ancient Rome.The nephew of Pliny
the Elder, who is considered by many to be the greatest
naturalist of antiquity.
Pliny was orphaned at an early age. He had Virginius Rufus (an
important man and general in the Roman army) as his tutor. He
was later adopted by his uncle Pliny the Elder, who brought him
to study in Rome, where his teachers were Quintilian and Nices
Sacerdos. Pliny was considered an honest and moderate man
and rose through a series of Imperial civil and military
offices, the cursus honorum.
wiki/Pliny_the_Younger
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder
www.piney.com/BibRom14Text.html
|
Plato
(427 BC – ca. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical
Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle,
writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Plato was also
deeply influenced by a number of prior philosophers, including:
the Pythagoreans, whose notions of numerical harmony have clear
echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms; Anaxagoras, who taught
Socrates and who held that the mind, or reason, pervades
everything; and Parmenides, who argued for the unity of all
things and may have influenced Plato's concept of the soul.
When he was 40 years old, Plato founded one of the earliest
known organized schools in Western civilization on a plot of
land in the Grove of Academe. it operated until AD 529,
when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium because he saw it
as a threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many
intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent
one being Aristotle.
Plato's thought is often compared with that of
his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the
Western Middle Ages completely eclipsed that of Plato.
Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western
civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the
century before its fall. Medieval scholars knew of Plato only
through translations into Latin from the translations into
Arabic by Persian and Arab scholars. These scholars not only
translated the texts of the ancients, but expanded them by
writing extensive commentaries and interpretations on Plato's
and Aristotle's works
Only in the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest
in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy
become widespread again in the West. Many of the greatest early
modern scientists and artists who fostered the flowering of the
Renaissance, with the support of the Medici family of Florence,
saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and
sciences.
Plato's Whine about Wine |
"Shall we not pass a law that,
in the first place, no children under eighteen may
touch wine at all, teaching that it is wrong to pour
fire upon fire either in body or in soul ... and
thus guarding against the excitable disposition of
the young? And next, we shall rule that the young
man under thirty may take wine in moderation, but
that he must entirely abstain from intoxication and
heavy drinking. But when a man has reached the age
of forty, he may join in the convivial gatherings
and invoke Dionysus, above all other gods,
inviting his presence at the rite (which is also the
recreation) of the elders, which he bestowed on
mankind as a medicine potent against the crabbedness
of Old Age, that thereby we men may renew our youth,
and that, through forgetfulness of care, the temper
of our souls may lose its hardness and become softer
and more ductile ..."
---[Plato, Laws 666b] |
Pederasty |
"When an older lover and a young
man come together and each obeys the principle
appropriate to him - when the lover realizes that he
is justified in doing anything for a loved one who
grants him favors, and when the young man
understands that he is justified in performing a
service for a lover who can make him wise and
virtuous - and when the lover is able to help the
young man become wise and better, and the young man
is eager to be taught and improved by his lover -
then, and only then, when these two principles
coincide absolutely, is it ever honorable for a
young man to accept the lover."
---Symposium |
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Plutarch
Mestrius Plutarch (cz.
46-ca. post 127) was a Greek historian, biographer, and
essayist.
His best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of
biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in tandem to
illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving
Lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair
containing one Greek Life and one Roman
Life,
as well as four unpaired single Lives. As he explains in the
first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not
concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the
influence of character — good or bad — on the lives and
destinies of famous men.
His collected works under the title of
the Moralia (loosely translated as Customs and Mores)
is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight essays and
transcribed speeches, which includes On the Fortune or the
Virtue of Alexander the Great - an important adjunct to his Life
of the great general, On the Worship of Isis and Osiris
(a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites
Plutarch lived most of his life at
Chaeronea, and was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god
Apollo. However his duties as the senior of the two priests of
Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi apparently occupied little
of his time - he led a most active social and civic life and
produced an incredible body of writings, much of which is still
extant.
Plutarch's philosophy was
eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and
Peripatetics (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of
Platonism. His main interest was in ethics, though he developed
a mystical side, especially in his later years; he reveals that
he had been initiated into the mysteries of the cult of
Dionysus, and both as a Platonist and as an initiate he believed
in the immortality of the soul.
Plutarch's writings had enormous influence on English and French
literature. Shakespeare occasionally quoted — and
extensively paraphrased — Thomas North's translation of several
of the Lives in his plays. American poet, philosopher, and
essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
Transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the Moralia
(Emerson wrote a glowing introduction to the five volume 19th
century edition of his Moralia).
classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/theseus.html |
|
Greco-Roman Dictionary  |
The
Most Exhaustive Reference Guide To Greco-Roman Studies, March
1, 2005
Reviewer: Octavius (United States) - See all my reviews
The Oxford Classical Dictionary is the most reputed if not
exhaustive reference guide to every conceivable subject
involving antiquity. Each topic is organized alphabetically and
has a detailed section with bibliographical references to
contemporary works as well as classical sources.
"Although I wouldn't recommend this as a first book for the
casual reader, this book is indispensable for all serious
scholars of classical studies."
at amazon.com |
A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875.
Published first in 1842 to the last in 1890‑91. The standard
encyclopedia reference with over 1 million words
A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities
John Murray, London,
1875. William Smith, D.C.L.,
LL.D.:
This index page collects the articles in Smith's Dictionary on
religion: temples, ritual, festivals, divination, priesthoods etc. For
general information about the Dictionary, and for about 400 articles on
other topics, see its homepage.
Smith's
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (search),
and
Smith's
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (search)
|
Pliny the Elder's encyclopedic
Natural History, (search),
a remarkable snapshot of the state of Geography, Ethnography,
Astronomy, Biology, and Geology in the early Roman empire.
Roman History texts:
Appian and
Polybius |
|
Main Page: Carnaval.com

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