This year’s Robbie Burns poem is entitled:
ANOTHER
(Epigram On The Said Occasion... On A Henpecked Country Squire)
One Queen Artemisia, as old stories tell,
When deprived of her husband she loved so well,
In respect for the love and affection he show'd her,
She reduc'd him to dust and she drank up the powder.
But Queen Netherplace, of a diff'rent complexion,
When called on to order the fun'ral direction,
Would have eat her dead lord, on a slender pretence,
Not to show her respect, but-to save the expense
Robert Burns 1794
Queen Artemisia, named after the Goddess Artemis, sister of Apollo, is the only woman Herodotus attributed with the virtue of courage, or andreia, an almost impossible quality for a woman to possess since it literally meant 'manliness'.
She married the king of Halicarnassus and when her beloved died she took the throne and made her name as a brave warrior and esteemed strategist. Artemisia absinthium, commonly known as wormwood, is used as an ingredient in the spirit Absinthe, the Green Faerie.
