Word: anciently
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Today at most U.S. colleges lion's teeth have been abandoned in favor of red meat, solid vegetables, milk, and fruit; but aside from this change in the menu, the ancient ritual goes on. And this is no less true of Harvard than any place else...
Years ago Dr. John Papadimitriou, director of antiquities in Greece's Ministry of Education, began collecting references to an ancient temple of Diana that apparently flourished for more than a thousand years near ancient Vravron, a fertile place on the east coast of Attica about 24 miles east of Athens. Herodotus mentioned the temple. So did Aristophanes, who hinted at orgies there. In Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris, the goddess Minerva tells Iphigenia and Orestes to take the statue of Diana that they had snatched from a temple in Tauris on the Black...
...Papadimitriou put together all his information from ancient sources and began to probe the ground at Vravron, now called Vraona, and inhabited by Albanian-speaking villagers, who grow tomatoes and cucumbers. Soon he found fragments of carved marble, which led him step by step toward the buried ruins of Diana's shrine. First to be found was the ceremonial "tomb" of Diana. Last June the overturned but well-preserved columns of the temple itself came to light. This month the diggers unearthed a magnificent stoa (portico) which can easily be restored. Many of the carved stones were in remarkably...
Diana's worship at Vraona had a special feature: little girls dressed as bears. According to an ancient legend, a couple of Athenian juvenile delinquents killed Diana's holy bear, and she sent a pestilence to punish their city. To square themselves with Diana, the citizens agreed to send five-to ten-year-old girls of noble families to Vraona to substitute for the murdered bear. No one seems to know whether these noble nymphets took part in the orgies mentioned by Aristophanes. Dr. Papadimitriou doubts it. They appear to have been housed, and perhaps chaperoned...
John O'Hara is perhaps the U.S.'s chief social embalmer of manners and morals among the moneyed. His latest novel is a massive pyramid of prose raised over the mummified form of a minor Pharoah of finance named Alfred Eaton. As if by ancient Egyptian custom, Eaton's living tomb is stocked with the appurtenances of his caste and class: tennis rackets, the entrance requirements for Princeton in 1915, a Marmon runabout, a roster of exclusive clubs, a Navy lieutenant's stripes, partnership in a Wall Street banking house, two wives, two mistresses...