Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Admen's Heartburn. This week, amid the scaffolding of half-finished office buildings, in ancient music halls hastily made into studios and in smart Mayfair suites, feverish platoons of producers, directors, scriptwriters, camera crews, actors and admen are marshaling their forces for TV-day-Sept. 22. Commercial television, British-style, will not start out as a replica of the American brand. By government ruling, only six minutes of sales talk will be allowed each hour, and the plugs must be concentrated at the beginning and end of the hour, or during "natural breaks" in the program. No sponsor...
TOURISTS from the U.S., swarming through Italy this summer in greater numbers than ever, keep coming across ancient deities in Renaissance dress. Because U.S. culture has little indigenous pagan art-largely confined to Indian reservations and museums-Americans are often somewhat shocked to find pagan gods at ease in Christian churches and palaces. But the shock soon turns to delight, for Renaissance artists could make the gods seem as at home in church as children at a party, and use them for the greater glory of Christianity (see color pages...
Actually, the pagan gods died, as gods, long before the collapse of the ancient world. Cicero's De Natura Deorum treats them as 1) historical personages. 2) cosmic symbols, and 3) allegories. Thus translated from the realm of blind faith to that of reason, they became deathless elements in the heritage of Western man. Yet in medieval times they led a shadowy life indeed. The church treated them as peasant superstitions (the Roman pagus was a country district), or turned them into demons. Satan, for example, inherited hooves and horns from the great god Pan. It remained...
...Sweeny, whose mistress was a masseuse in a Turkish bath; City Comptroller Richard ("Slippery Dick") Connolly, and Mayor Abraham Oakey ("Elegant Oakey") Hall, who wrote a play called Let Me Kiss Him For His Mother, and who, while District Attorney, gave a dramatic reading titled Dido versus Aeneas, an ancient breach of promise trial...
...betray a national secret. But when carbon 14 is mentioned, he lights up like a Roman candle. He remembers with special pleasure his dealings with the archaeologists. "They are all as poor as church mice," he says, "but such enthusiasm!" They brought him unimpressive things -fragments of charcoal from ancient hearths, or bones of extinct bison-and when he measured the age of the objects, the archaeologists made him feel that he had done something priceless and wonderful for them...