Word: lycurgus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dying in a Spartan jail in the year 500-and-something B.C., the hero of this sharp and provoking little antihistorical novel finds no difficulty in giving verbatim quotations from the Dryden translation (17th century A.D.) of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus (2nd century A.D.). It is true that he is a certified Seer of Apollo, and the future drifts before his eyes as effortlessly as the past or the present. So the reader need not be really surprised to find Lycurgus (spelled Ly-kourgos, in the barbarous tradition of contemporary university classics departments), a dim semi-mythological figure...
Agathon was once a handsome and ambitious academic-political young man, an Archaic Period Kissinger to the John Mitchell of Lycurgus, the famous lawgiver who recast the constitution of Sparta in a fierce authoritarian mold. Now Agathon is a drunken old bum. In between, he has fought a battle disguised as a woman, seduced and married the daughter of an archon, helped the Ionian philosophers invent humanism, rationalism and Western civilization, betrayed his best friend to the Athenian FBI, and made love to the wives of all his friends. By teaching his greatest love, a Helot woman, to read...
...fatality. At still others, when what he calls facticity catches up with him, Agathon is just a slobbish old lecher smelling of onions. In this guise he represents the irreducible, incorrigible lump of humanity that always jams up the bright theoretical machines continually being invented by one Lycurgus or another, and thus saves mankind from betterment...