Word: ancients
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Indeed, the poet Juvenal's complaint about ancient Rome might be made against almost any modern city...
...city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees...
When nations were smaller than they are today, Athens could be great with 100,000 people, Renaissance Florence with 60,000, Alexandria with 700,000 and ancient Rome with something like 1,000,000-no more than live in metropolitan Indianapolis now. To represent all the diverse elements of much more populous societies-diversity is one essential of greatness-the city must now have a population of several millions. Cincinnati and Phoenix, to cite two typical American provincial cities, may be agreeable places to live in, but they are simply not large enough to contain, as does New York...
...great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon...
Records of ancient temperatures are provided by O18, a heavy isotope of oxygen that has 18 neutrons in its nucleus instead of the 16 found in ordinary oxygen atoms. About one of every 500 atoms of oxygen in water is O18, and water molecules containing the heavy isotope will fall from clouds in the form of rain or snow before those with ordinary oxygen atoms. In colder weather, the isotope falls even more rapidly. Thus, by the time that clouds arrive over the site where the ice cores were taken, the ratio of O18 atoms to ordinary oxygen atoms...