Word: opper
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...state in crisis. 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...
...reign, which lasted 21 years until his death in A.D. 138, Hadrian set about reshaping Rome's overreaching foreign policy. He withdrew troops from flashpoints such as Armenia, but maintained influence overseas through complicated negotiations and treaties. "The Romans could still project power beyond their borders," says Opper, but "they did it through diplomacy." Meanwhile, he used financial carrots to win over citizens at home: the show features a relief in which wax tablets listing Romans' debts are carried off by soldiers to be burned...
...display are implements that belonged to refugees from this conflict - mirrors, pans, house keys and a jewelry box found alongside their skeletons in a cave where they hid. "The last people to touch these items before our colleagues in Israel's museums," says Opper, "were the people awaiting Hadrian's onslaught." These humble objects - perfectly preserved in the desert heat - may be quotidian, yet they offer as resonant an insight into Hadrian's world as the exquisitely refined statues that he commissioned to memorialize the love he had lost...
...Opper wonders how he got along without Surfline. A TV sports producer by profession and beach bum at heart, the Californian dials 976-SURF almost every day. For 95 cents a call, Surfline reviews beach conditions along 485 miles of coast from Santa Cruz to San Diego, updated twice daily based on reports from 100 part-time scouts. Says Opper, 39: "It's like having a direct line to King Neptune." Thanks to devoted dialers like Opper, the 3 1/2-year-old Surfline handles 1.2 million calls a year in California and has expanded to three area codes in Florida...
...days before Pogo, Li'l Abner and the cold war, one of the best-loved characters in U.S. comic strips was Fred Opper's amiable tramp, Happy Hooligan. Today the grim commissars of Russia use Happy's name to describe a crime they regard as the essence of capitalist decadence. Last week the wife of a U.S. embassy employee in Moscow was officially accused of "hooliganism" and asked to leave the country. According to accounts blared out over Radio Moscow, pert and pretty Mrs. Betty Sommerlatte, whose husband Karl is an embassy second secretary, had viciously punched...