Word: greekness
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Reviled and admired, envied and feared, Babylon - the remains of which lie some 50 miles (80 km) south of modern-day Baghdad - has for centuries been shrouded in myth. Despite its description by Greek historians as a center of political power, the fables tend to overshadow any sense of what the city was actually like. "Everyone knows the name and the legends of Babylon," says Francis Joannès, a professor of ancient history and Mesopotamia at the Sorbonne. "But what people don't necessarily know is its reality...
Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts - in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus - describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel...
...This brings us to the breaking news: yesterday’s implication of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement in an upscale Washington prostitution ring. Spitzer’s downfall is particularly “tragic” in the Greek sense of the word: His meteoric rise to power closely mirrored Sarkozy’s. Existentially pugnacious, detested and admired at once, Spitzer paid his dues as New York’s Attorney General, where he dazzled with his unflinching resolve to take on Wall Street corruption and white-collar crime. He won himself a fair...
...December 1 at the age of 86, was praised for his 12 years of service as a house master, his five-year term as chair of the Classics Department, and his central role in reviving Harvard University Press’s Classical Library, which publishes English translations of Greek and Latin texts. But Stewart’s record of humility and caring for those who ranked lower than him—what his daughter, Sarah B. Stewart, called “a deep love, respect, and interest in other creatures”—was most noted. Classics professor...
...Given the landscape of college athletics, the dodgy practices of other college athletic departments are ones Harvard would do well to avoid. In determining its institutional priorities, the Harvard community should view athletics in the way it views Greek life. In the case of fraternities and sororities, for instance, there is no problem that they exist at Harvard, but we wouldn’t want to make Greek life a central culture of the University...