Baucis and philemon full story
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Kublai Khan listens attentively as Marco Polo tells him about fantastical cities, even though he doesn’t entirely believe everything Marco says. Kublai’s empire is huge and he knows that he’ll never be able to truly understand his conquered territories, which makes him feel melancholy and as though his empire is an unfixable, corrupt ruin. Through Marco’s stories, Kublai begins to see that there’s a pattern to his empire.
Marco describes Diomira, a city with towers. It makes people feel envious of others who believe they’ve experienced similar evenings and think that they were happy. In Isidora, a person can find every delight—but men who arrive there arrive in old age, not in their youth. It’s possible to describe Dorothea by listing its exports, but it’s also possible to say, as a camel driver once told Marco, that Dorothea opens up horizons. Marco then tells Kublai about Zaira, where the measurements of certain things correspond to events from Zaira’s past. In this sense, Zaira’s past is written in those things while making people feel as though they can enjoy the city. Marc
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Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered., and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, on after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides Ancient Greek mythical characters Baucis and Philemon (Greek: Φιλήμων και Βαυκίς, romanized: Philēmōn kai Baukis) are two characters from Greek mythology, only known to us from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Baucis and Philemon were an old married couple in the region of Tyana, which Ovid places in Phrygia, and the only ones in their town to welcome disguised gods Zeus and Hermes (in Roman mythology, Jupiter and Mercury respectively), thus embodying the pious exercise of hospitality, the ritualized guest-friendship termed xenia, or theoxenia when a god was involved. Zeus and Hermes came disguised as ordinary peasants, and began asking the people of the town for a place to sleep that night. They had been rejected by all, "so wicked were the people of that land", when at last they came to Baucis and Philemon's simple rustic cottage. Though the couple were poor, their generosity far surpassed that of their rich neighbors, among whom the gods found "doors bolted and no word of kindness". After serving the two guests food and
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Baucis and Philemon
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