Word: greekness
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Charles P. Segal ’57, a classics professor who brought contemporary techniques of literary criticism to bear on ancient Greek and Latin texts, died on Jan. 1 in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after a year-long battle with cancer...
...Hanson, a classics professor at California State University at Fresno, first analyzed Western military dynamism in his 1989 work, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Ancient Greece. He argued that the Western military ethos is traceable to warring Greek city-states, which contracted among themselves to meet at an agreed-on battlefield, fight to a decisive conclusion and not yield that field until one side was broken. The idea took root that war's central purpose was to "find and engage (the enemy) in order to end the entire business as quickly as possible." Subtitled Landmark Battles...
...Greek phalanx?columns of spear-carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome?established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...
...monopoly on individual bravery or strategic genius. It's just that culture and history have made Westerners more skilled on the killing fields. And in a passage Osama bin Laden (or Japanese militarists) might have profited from, Hanson points to the way in which the West's Greek-originated ethical ideas generate a murderous indignation: "We in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise 'cowardly,' the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault 'fair...
...came home, and told everyone no, I didn't go off to war. I told them what a great adventure I'd had, rumbling through the desert in a Humvee, soldiering alongside French and German, Greek and Italian, Kuwaiti and Egyptian, practicing for the next international war effort even as it brewed in actuality not too far away. I told everyone I wouldn't have minded going all the way, for six months and for real, and they all looked me with you're-crazy smiles. Some of them even said I was brave, just for wanting...