Word: greeks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...love, though he's learned the gestures. Yet looking at his compromised memories, he wells up, and so do we, even as we know we're being sold. The Kodak suits want to focus on their machine's technology. Don argues that its true pull is emotional. "In Greek," Don says, "nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound...
Although married to a relative of Trajan, Hadrian openly loved a Greek youth, Antinous, who is known to have accompanied him on at least one lion-hunting trip. His relationship with this boy would have raised few eyebrows - the Roman élite embraced homoerotic culture and celebrated it in works of art. Hadrian's reaction to his death, however, was unprecedented. After Antinous drowned in the Nile in A.D. 130, Hadrian mourned him as if he were an Empress and encouraged cults to venerate the lowly youth. He surrounded himself with marble statues and busts of Antinous, at least...
...Trajan, his predecessor, had stretched the Roman Empire to its furthest reaches through aggressive military campaigns, sparking rebellions from Britain to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Once installed as ruler, Hadrian reversed the expansionist trend and withdrew troops from what is now Iraq. Thorsten Opper, a curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, says Hadrian realized then what coalition forces realize now: that it's easier to control territory through a friendly, well-functioning government than through occupation...
Hadrian also worked to secure his popularity outside the city, traveling the empire to cultivate alliances, particularly with the Greeks. Through iconography, he cast himself as the protector of Greek culture, which still held sway throughout the eastern Mediterranean and beyond: an imposing statue of Hadrian in military regalia shows him trampling a barbarian - powerful imagery in the Greek portion of the empire, which had been traumatized by rebellion. His breastplate further emphasizes the Greco-Roman union, displaying the Greek goddess Athena standing upon a she-wolf that was a symbol of Rome...
...Hadrian's interest in Greece went beyond state security. "He wanted to become a Greek," says Anthony Birley, author of the biography Hadrian: The Restless Emperor. Hadrian admired Greek language and architecture, and became the first emperor to sport a beard, then fashionable in the Greek world. Busts of Hadrian display his lavish curls, which specially trained slaves coiffed with irons...