Word: hellespont
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...graduate. For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast. It is a lesson I will be absorbing, with difficulty, between now and June. In the meantime, though, I’d be glad to tell you about the time that Byron swam the Hellespont...
...actually possess that single unknown quality that defies explanation. That is how many of Thrace's neighbors must have felt. The Greeks, for example, were both baffled and obsessed by the Thracians, and so labelled them "barbarians." The Trojan War was waged largely to gain control of Thrace's Hellespont (the Dardanelles). So there were definite strategic motives for heeding that nation. And yet it put forward, in some regions, what to the Greeks seemed bizarre notions, particularly about death...
...opening new cities and industries with every section, returning in tolls and levies its $7 million construction cost in less than ten years of completion. It proved one of the most profitable ventures in the nation's history, and even the original skeptics eventually hailed it as the Hellespont of the West, the Grand Canal...
...novelist invented a character like Lord Byron, he would be set down as an opportunistic fictioneer with an eye on the bestseller list. Byron, after all, was almost too much. He was a good if not great poet; he was handsome; he could swim the Hellespont, even with a game leg; he had affairs with men as well as women including, some believe, his half sister. He was also a political rebel. When he died at 34 in Missolonghi, Greece, he was planning and financing a revolt against the Turkish oppressors...
...people managed to live without the excitement of an occasional Indian fight, or a scrimmage with the Mexicans, or even a tussle with a bear now and then to keep their blood in circulation." Adventure was that incorrigible traveler and taleteller, Richard Halliburton, whether swimming the Hellespont or crossing the Alps à la Hannibal on an elephant...