Word: athenians
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Further, the four distinct plots of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, which clog it plenty as a play, virtually wreck it as a musical. Helena, Hermia & Co. prove just as ghastly bores running loose in the wooded outskirts of New Orleans as in the Athenian groves. Nor are some of the headliners all they might be. Louis Armstrong should stick to his blast, not try to play Bottom. The Maxine Sullivan who sings Moonland is not the irresistible Maxine Sullivan of Loch Lomond...
...Solon's peaceful revolution," says Durant, "is one of the encouraging miracles of history." He introduced a graduated income tax, created a popular assembly to check the old-fashioned aristocratic council, made the entire citizenry a panel from which jurors were chosen. The quarrelsome Athenians might not have stuck to these laws if a dictator, Peisistratus, had not enforced them for a generation; after that they became habitual. About 507 B.C. another persuasive political thinker, Cleisthenes, extended an Athenian device which for pure democracy has never been equalled: selection of legislators by lot from the whole list of citizens...
...grew more famed, Socrates began to hobnob with aristocrats, took gifts of money from them, became less ascetic, changed wives (from shrewish, lowborn Xanthippe to patrician Myrto). By the time he had passed 50, Socrates was followed by no rabble but by young aristocrats who plotted to overthrow the Athenian democracy...
...pupils was Critias, who, Professor Winspear says, "had been a young man of democratic sympathies" before he fell under Socrates' influence. Critias became the Adolf Hitler of his day. When Athenian aristocrats, with Sparta's help, established an oligarchy, Critias led "the notorious and bloody reactionary dictatorship of the Thirty," which executed some 1,500 Athenians. When Athenian democrats returned to power, they decided "to hew the head off and not hack the limbs," condemned Socrates to death...
...play, pure fantasia, passes back and forth from satire to poetry. The masks and costumes seek to retain the comic realism of the ancient Athenian productions, and the lines give classical flavor to the whole...