senators off message

From paultheskeptic: Reading your recent post on Spartacat, I was struck by how unclear Ottawa Senators branding is. Their team name is Senators, but instead of a toga clad laurel wearing middle aged plutocrat, they sport a rather miffed looking military fellow on their crest - a centurion perhaps? Their mascot is named Spartacat, presumably a "clever" play on the name Spartacus, the Thracian slave who lead a slave revolt against the Roman republic. Why would the Centurions/Senators have a rebel slave as their mascot. Or is this an attempt to show how oligarchies subvert and exploit their slaves.

Perhaps I don't give the Centurions enough credit. I'd be tempted to believe this if their arena hadn't originally been called the Palladium and was still on Palladium Drive. The real Palladium isn't even a building, it's a picture of Pallas Athene, but the Palladium was kept in a building, the temple of Vesta - Goddess of the Hearth. The inhabitants of the temple weren't senators, centurions or slave revolt leaders though. They were vestal virgins, young women who were kept busy tending the sacred fire and dusting the sacred artifacts like the Palladium, presumably to stop them from falling prey to Roman bad boys like Spartacus who would like nothing better than to carry off a few vestal virgins on his Vespa.

It's this Palladium link-up that makes me think that the team needs to realign it's branding and change the name to the Ottawa Vestal Virgins.