Appreciations of Nietzsche as a so-called poet-philosopher reveal little about Nietzsche’s thinking about the poets and they pay insufficient attention to his conception of philosophy. This chapter offers a corrective by examining how he figures the task of the poets in his middle writings. The focus is on what he has to say about the poets in relation to the passions, as this provides the best way of approaching the problem. His criticisms of the poets – that they are fundamentally melancholic and that they too readily give vent to naturalizing impulses – is best seen in the context of his upholding philosophy’s classical concern with and teaching of the mastery of the passions. The concern with self-cultivation informs Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy at a deep level, and it also drives his reflections on the poets. Poets are significant because they assume the task of providing signposts to the future by developing images of what he calls “beautiful human beings.” I attend to Nietzsche’s interest in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in the final section of the chapter, since it is from Stifter that Nietzsche may have derived, at least in part, his conception of the cultivation of beautiful human beings.

This chapter offers a new reading of Sappho’s Tithonos Poem, and turns to Sedgwick’s “bardo” writings as a framework for exploring the feeling of suspension that characterizes Sappho’s poem. Sappho’s lyrics respond to the absences and silences in epic, as well as to what is more explicitly there. Often, the body in Sappho can be understood as providing cues for the voice, with symptoms arising within the body prompting the singer’s recall of certain mythical parallels. In the Tithonos Poem, for example, the singer’s sense of heaviness in her limbs prompts her recall of the mythical figure Tithonos, the ever-aging yet deathless lover of Dawn. It is argued that the singer’s own groaning lament becomes intertwined with that of Dawn for Tithonos, but it also potentially channels Achilles’ mourning for Patroklos. Sappho ventriloquizes the voices of Homeric characters. This has been acknowledged in the case of Helen but as this chapter argues, Achilles’ mournful lament also provides a surprising and powerful zone of contact between the worlds of epic and lyric.

The presence of ammonium on Ceres was first speculated based on telescopic data in the 1990s. Subsequent data from Dawn unambiguously confirmed the presence on Ceres’s surface. Ammonium has been identified within near-ubiquitous dark materials, and in salts in few localized bright faculae in the interiors of craters as we describe further in this chapter.

The presence of ammonium on Ceres is significant because it implies the availability of ammonia during its evolution. More broadly, understanding the processes that led to the presence of ammonium on Ceres provides important information on the aqueous environments in the early Solar System and the origins and dynamical histories of the large outer main belt asteroids. We briefly review the significance of ammonia and then describe what was known or speculated about ammoniated species on Ceres before Dawn’s arrival. We then review findings of the Dawn mission, in particular the detection and mapping of ammoniated phases by the Visible and Infrared spectrometer (VIR): which species host ammonia/ammonium, their abundance, and spatial distribution. We then discuss the potential origins and implications of ammonia, drawing on laboratory studies and modeling efforts. Finally, we summarize the key findings and the outstanding questions that remain for future investigation.

New visible and infrared data of minor bodies, including minor planet 1 Ceres, asteroids 4 Vesta, 21 Lutetia, 2867 Steins and comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (hereafter 67P/CG) have been collected in the last years by remote sensing instruments aboard NASA-Dawn and ESA-Rosetta missions. These minor bodies are among the most primitive bodies in the Solar System, and the understanding of their composition, surface morphology and evolution history is a fundamental step to shed light on the processes that occurred during planetary formation.By merging spatial and spectral information retrieved from the surfaces of these objects it is possible to infer their composition and physical properties and to correlate them with local morphology and geological processes. A discussion about spectral indicators, modeling, and mapping is given for both asteroids and comet 67P/CG. Given that the remote sensing observation techniques are very similar between Dawn and Rosetta missions, a comparative approach is used for the entire chapter and methods and interpretation for the results of these different objects are given together.