The Archregimancy wrote:The New California Republic wrote:Diving helmets.
No, no, no...
There was a little-known 6th-century aristocratic Byzantine fashion for dressing heads with gilded soap bubbles. Justin II (r. 565-574) started to have fits of insanity in 572, though he had moments of lucidity. On his abdication he famously declared (as recorded by the historian Theophylact Simocatta):You behold the ensigns of supreme power. You are about to receive them, not from my hand, but from the hand of God. Honour them, and from them you will derive honour. Respect the empress your mother: you are now her son; before, you were her servant. Delight not in blood; abstain from revenge; avoid those actions by which I have incurred the public hatred such as wearing these silly gilded soap bubbles on our heads; and consult the experience, rather than the example, of your predecessor. As a man, I have sinned; as a sinner, even in this life, I have been severely punished: but these servants (and he pointed to his ministers), who have abused my confidence, and inflamed my passions, will appear with me before the tribunal of Christ. I have been dazzled by the splendor of the diadem: be thou wise and modest; remember what you have been, remember what you are. You see around us your slaves, and your children: with the authority, assume the tenderness, of a parent. Love your people like yourself; cultivate the affections, maintain the discipline, of the army; protect the fortunes of the rich, relieve the necessities of the poor
Those soap bubbles were introduced by Justin in 573, and even though by this point he was manifestly insane, such was the emperor's influence at court that Byzantine courtiers had to follow the fashion, and court artists started to introduce them in paintings - even into religious iconography. They were subsequently explained away as 'halos', and continued to feature in Christian art across the Mediterranean, but this was simply retrospective cover for what was little more than desperate scrambling to follow the whims of a mad emperor who had to be towed around the Great Palace sitting on a throne in a little cart while listening to organ music - and wearing a gilded soap bubble on his head.
...I can't tell if this is real or satire.