Word: byzantium
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...such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come...
...almost bound to happen. Graves has been interested for years in the Imperial Roman period and the Near East into which Jesus Christ was born. Graves has written ingeniously learned novels about Rome (I, Claudius), Byzantium (Count Belisarius), the mythic age of Greece (Hercules, My Shipmate). His friend, the late great T. E. Lawrence, who spent the best years of his life between the Nile and the Promised Land, once amused himself by mapping the probable route of the Israelites in the Sinai desert. Graves's latest job is in the same line but not so modest...
...Russians Kiev was the "mother of cities," Russia's ancient capital, a venerated center of history and lore, a beloved and lovely spot. From Kiev, Slav buccaneers sailed on their raids to ancient Byzantium, down the Dnieper and across the turbulent Black Sea. A thousand years ago, Kiev's ruler, Prince Vladimir, was baptized in the sluggish Dnieper, made Kiev the heart of Russia's Greek Orthodox faith. When Berlin was still a muddy village, Kiev's famed Petchersky Monastery was green with...
...screen built to hold icons when cathedral walls were full), visitors saw the tall spare figures of saints and Virgins, mournful of mien, with inclining haloed heads and slim-fingered hands. These paintings represented the oldest and most continuous art tradition of Europe-a tradition whose source was Byzantium ("icon" is from the Greek eikon, "image"). Icon painters of the 11th to 17th Centuries, "humble and mild and pious" (as a 16th Century Church Council enjoined them to be), painted as reverently as they prayed, "remembering the work of the earlier painters, following the best models." Only in the last...
...springs from the bewilderment of men who are living through the apparently irrational collapse of a great civilization, "the happiest," says Chamberlin, "and certainly the most creative in the history of Europe." The sense of irrationality is all the greater because this civilization did not decay like Rome or Byzantium by agelong stages of dry rot, but apparently cracked up suddenly and catastrophically, like an incomparable machine shak en to pieces by the super-power of its own superb engines...