Word: byzantium
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Crossroads Jumble. The ancient city has seen the glory and decline of two empires. Founded by the Greeks six centuries before Christ, and chosen as the site of a new Rome by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 330, the city was known first as Byzantium. As Constantinople, it was a world capital for 1,100 years until it fell in 1453 to the founders of a new empire, the vigorous Turks of the Ottoman Conqueror Mohammed...
...mission-to unite Britain. Novelist Treece supplies Artos with two Guineveres to Malory's one (but uses the Welsh, Gwenhwyfar). The first Gwenhwyfar is a flaxen haired homebody, his half sister as well as mother of his child. The second is a kind of dusky call girl from Byzantium, a Gwenhwyfar from home. Artos makes her amorous acquaintance in a shivery session atop one of the ancient slabs at Stonehenge. He takes her to wife, but inevitably the day comes when the Count of Britain must off to the wars to fight the advancing Picts. Artos leaves Gwenhwyfar...
...with the precise and sometimes beautiful delivery of Peggy Polk, Nancy Curtis, Keith Gardiner, and Harold Scott, exploited well what the poem had to offer. But to me this was not a great deal. Junger's language is often musical and thrilling, but his images of fallen glory (grey Byzantium, the sleeping emperor, druids) and modern confusion (herds of taxis, flame-winged planes, departing stars) seemed little more than trite. At times it was difficult to escape the feeling that one was being served warmed-over Yeats. For me this use of commonplace imagery counteracted the strength which language alone...
...figures of lawmakers to adorn the new home of the first Appellate Department of the New York court system, overlooking Manhattan's Madison Square. The other nine were Moses, Hindustan's Manu, Persia's Zoroaster, Sparta's Lycurgus, Athens' Solon, China's Confucius, Byzantium's Justinian, Wessex' Alfred and France's Louis IX. An odd list, but it is easy to see what those who drew it up had in mind. They wanted to express the universality of the idea of law. Lycurgus and Confucius, Zoroaster and Alfred stand for very...
RAVENNA is the world's chief repository of early Byzantine art, surpassing even Istanbul, the capital of Byzantium. The ancient churches and chapels of the sleepy Italian town (pop. 35,000) are lit by windowpanes of translucent alabaster and by the glitter and blaze of great mosaics such as the triumphant Christ opposite. Ravenna's mosaics, made of innumerable bits of glass, gold and marble chips stuck in plaster, have neither the drama of Gothic church art nor the human warmth of the Renaissance masters. Yet they are equally great, and gayer than either. Their gaiety expresses...