Desultory activity by naked men.

Some days are just blah.  Not much exciting going on.  Not much to get excited about frankly.  So one just putters around, going from one task to another without a lot of enthusiasm for any of them.  Just "dialing it in" to use a now dated metaphor.  A slightly older term for this behaviour, listless activity undertaken with indifference, is desultory.  

And it was on just such a Saturday morning a while back that I actually discovered the origins of the word desultory.  It involves naked guys jumping around on galloping horses!

The mosaic pictures below are from the Roman era and depict "desultores".  The term literally means one who "leaps down".  In performances at the Roman circus they would put on quite an acrobatic show leaping on and off running horses.  Sometimes they would have a team of four or six riding abreast and leap from one to another for the amusement of the crowd.

The monochrome mosaics shown above are in the basement of the Palazzo Farnese, a high Renaissance palace that now serves as the French Embassy.  

I'm not certain where this one comes from but at least the horse seems quite a bit less enthusiastic.  He seems to be going about his business in a desultory fashion in our familiar, modern sense of the word!