Much Love Monday

While in Athens, I visited the Scenes from Daily Life in Antiquity section of the Cycladic Art Museum, where the photo below was taken. What struck me most was how integrated different aspects of life were: art was used to decorate everyday objects, citizens were to receive physical training in order to be prepared for war, virtue was not an abstract quality but a practical means by which to live a happier life.
I think that contemporary life is more compartmentalised: not only do we never experience basic elements of life (like growing food), but we seem to be taught that thinking is an activity separate from our actions.
If you read the ancient classics, you will note how the arts, sciences, history, religion and myth were at times indivisible. Greek myth - which some relegate to the realm of "the fantastic", not intellectually relevant - is about how we experience reality, the psychological drama and such. It is the "truth" of experience, not the "truth" of numbers. Art is inspiration for science: 

By arts, sails, and oars, ships are rapidly moved; arts move the light chariot, and establish love.  

Ovid, Ars Amotoria I,3. Art moves the light chariot, art establishes love. The word art itself meant something different then: skill resulting from practice. How important is art to you?
What do you expect of art? Is it something to hang on the wall, or decoration for something you need?
Horace writes about the art of poetry, explaining "the ultimate goal of poetry: to please and to instruct; to seduce and to educate; to entertain and to teach... but the writer who has combined the pleasant with the useful wins on all points by delighting the reader while he gives advice." (Ars Poetica, Epistula ad Pisones) The famous phrase from this extract is dulce et utile: the pleasant with the useful.
I think the vase below symbolises this, and that is why it is today's image for Much Love Monday.

Elements: canvas background: fuzzimo; glitter circles, shipping tag: pugly pixel;

font: ostrich sans via moveable type via Lula Louise.