Word: maximus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira provoked this Circus Maximus by taking a gamble--one most observers thought he would win easily. He dissolved Japan's parliament, the Diet, in September, and called for a new election less than a year after his surprise victory in the last party election. Nothing recent conservative gains in local elections, Ohira saw a chance to buttress his own power with a big victory for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which in recent years has lost the Diet majority it had maintained through the last three decades. Ohira stumped for a tax hike to combat...
...entertainment in the imperial city assumed an influence not unlike that of television today. Armies of Roman unemployed, living on a dole from the state, were diverted by athletic contests and theatrical spectacles. At the Colosseum, some 50,000 watched gladiators in combat with wild beasts. In the Circus Maximus, 260,000 cheered on charioteers as they raced in perilous Ben-Hur style. To supply those circuses, hunters fanned through the empire, caging behemoths and great wild cats. So many animals were rounded up that even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion...
...elegant earl never got around to marrying his son's mother and had a bad habit of keeping worthies like Dr. Johnson cooling their heels for hours in an anteroom attests to the fact that even the most well-intentioned men have been postponers ever. Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the great Roman generals, was dubbed "Cunctator " (Delayer) for putting off battle until the last possible vinum break. Moses pleaded a speech defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Jehovah's edicts to Pharaoh. Hamlet, of course, raised procrastination to an art form...
Sacred music has no part in our lives. In a time when even the Roman Church--pontifex maximus and all--has abandoned the Latin tongue and with it most traditions, there remains barely a shadow of the meaning that church music once had for its listeners. The beauty of the compositions remains intact, however, and Sunday evening's concert was in a nearly ideal setting with the Harvard Glee Club joined by the boys of the St. Paul Choir Scool...
Since football is every bit as important to the Texas social structure as bourbon and the Baptist Church, it is only fitting that the fair should kick off with the annual Texas-Oklahoma game. This Southwestern tribal ritual more closely resembles a vigorous bloodletting in the Circus Maximus than a friendly athletic contest. Instead of musky wine from handwrought goblets, though, the spectators knock down rye whisky from leather-bound flasks while the hot-blooded young gladiators, as they say down home, whup ole Billy outa one another. Turns out, for the first time in five years, it is Oklahoma...