Word: gracchi
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Comparisons of the fate of the family to Greek tragedy are commonplace, though the analogy comes just as close to the Romans. The Gracchi, two highborn brothers in the second century B.C. who scorned their fellow aristocrats and were elected tribunes to effect social good, were both assassinated. But when one thinks of the Kennedys, the Greeks come to mind--the Agamemnon family especially--because one feels that their disasters can only be the result of some terrible curse. It's all nonsense and superstition, of course. But this is what happens when "frail thoughts dally with false surmise" about...
...revision of tutorial topics, which was solely in faculty hands save for informal consultation with tutors by the faculty involved, only three of the old topics survived. In their place the following selections are in the process of preparation: Pre-1700 Europe: The Gracchi, the Norman Conquest, and The Peasants' Revolt of 1525: Modern Europe: The French Revolution, Sigmund Freud. The Iran Crisis: America: American Slavery. The Origins of the Cold War, and The American West; Historiography: Positivism and Anti-positivism. Historians and Their Craft...
...rebel, and refused to knuckle under completely to the academic grind at Harvard. He read voraciously, but for information, not for exams. He became absorbed in certain areas of the curriculum, and tended to ignore the rest. As he noted in his autobiography, "I worked drearily at the Gracchi because I had to; my conscientious and much-to-be-pitied professor dragging me through the theme by main strength, with my feet firmly planted in dull and totally idea-proof resistance...
...Populars were a mass party of planners and share-the-wealthers, founded a generation before by the Gracchi. The Optimates were a conservative elite of class-conscious constitutionalists. Marius was a leader of the Populars, and in 88 B.C. the Optimates, under the generalship of Sulla, ran him out of town and nailed the heads of his leading followers up in the Forum. Later Sulla was to spare young Julius, but warned, "One day this man may destroy the cause that you and I uphold. For this Caesar is worth six of Marius." Caesar went off to soldier in Asia...
...movement's name: the Cornelian Corner, from 1) Cornelia, Roman mother of the Gracchi, who called her sons her "jewels," and 2) the time-honored maternal practice of turning toward a corner, away from the family, when nursing a baby. Its president: Detroit Psychiatrist Max Wolfe...