Word: agamemnon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...though the analogy comes just as close to the Romans. The Gracchi, two highborn brothers in the second century B.C. who scorned their fellow aristocrats and were elected tribunes to effect social good, were both assassinated. But when one thinks of the Kennedys, the Greeks come to mind--the Agamemnon family especially--because one feels that their disasters can only be the result of some terrible curse. It's all nonsense and superstition, of course. But this is what happens when "frail thoughts dally with false surmise" about people and events too big to grasp. The Kennedys instill thoughts beyond...
...there no sense, no purpose, to the universe? Later R.F.K. scrawled on a yellow sheet, "The innocent suffer--how can that be possible and God be just?" He found solace in Aeschylus, memorizing the lines from the Agamemnon that he would use when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed: "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace...
Among the plays he wrote were "Agamemnon," "TheCurse of an Aching Heart" and "Nothing Doing...
Sophocles' Electra is no Hamlet. She doesn't agonize over whether to avenge the murder of her father Agamemnon by killing her mother Clytemnestra. She just does it (or rather, has her brother Orestes do it). Leveaux, who has brought his crisp staging of the tragedy from London to Broadway, says he was thinking of events in Bosnia: Can the cycle of vengeance ever end? Yet he resists the urge to add modern complexities to this fiercely singleminded play. Enough to watch the talented Zoe Wanamaker as a very human, almost waifish Electra, buried in a gigantic overcoat, like...
...child growing up in Ankershagen, Germany, in the early part of the 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann knew his destiny. He vowed that when he was a man, he'd prove that the people, places and events that had entranced him in Homer's Iliad--Helen and Agamemnon, the siege of Troy and the magnificent city itself--were more than just legends. Or so he later wrote. Like many of Schliemann's tales, this one may have been a trifle exaggerated. "In general, scholars accept the fact that Schliemann told a great many lies," says David Traill, a classicist...