Leonardo da Vinci has set up an elaborate trap within a complex labyrinth beneath his studio to protect his valuable designs and artwork to deter would-be thieves. But his three unsuspecting and inquisitive apprentices whose attempts to pry into those secrets are caught in this maze of challenges, which if unsuccessful in solving, jeopardize their employment and bright future as artists, and possibly their lives.The story takes place in Florence, Italy in the late 1400s and includes insights into Leonardo da Vinci's persona as well as the extreme challenges and adventures of his inquisitive apprentices. The story begins with discovery and ends with a revelation that possibly solves one of the long-standing mysteries that have perplexed historians for centuries.
Shows a variety of antique and modern puzzles, including puzzle locks and rings, and folding, impossible object, vanish, dexterity, sequential movement, disentanglement, interlocking, and take-apart puzzles
Toward the end of the year A.D. 8, the emperor Augustus publicly sentenced the poet Ovid to exile in remote and barbaric Tomis on the Black Sea. The action presumably followed a secret hearing before the emperor, and the official reason given for the sentence was Ovid's authorship of a licentious work, the Ars amatoria, ten years earlier. The Mystery of Ovid's Exile is both a survey and an analysis of the literary detective work that has been devoted to explaining the cause of Ovid's banishment from Rome. In poems composed during his exile, Ovid laments having written the Ars amatoria, but he obviously considers the poem to be merely a pretext for his punishment. His downfall appears to have been caused by his having witnessed, or in some fashion been implicated in, a crime committed either by the emperor himself or by an immediate member of the imperial family. However, it’s possible that Ovid's banishment may have been ordered merely because he was unwittingly in possession of the key to an embarrassing secret, the importance of which he might have realized had he remained in Rome. John C. Thibault examines more than one hundred available hypotheses that have been advanced by inquisitive scholars from the Middle Ages to our own day. He demonstrates the unsoundness of each hypothesis in turn, and suggests that a solution to the problem of Ovid's exile is not possible given the available evidence. The Mystery of Ovid's Exil treats a controversy that will fascinate classical scholars as well as general readers interested in Roman manners and morals of the period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.
This innovative work replaces magic square numbers with two-dimensional forms. The result is a revelation that traditional magic squares are now better seen as the one-dimensional instance of this self-same geometrical activity.
This book presents a little-known and ingenious artefact of the Roman world: a small puzzle padlock whose font plate bears a face or ‘mask’ of ‘Celtic’ style.
