Word: peloponnesian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just's detached and determinedly accurate assessment belongs to a tradition of war reporting that traces back to Thucydides, the ancient historian whose account of the Peloponnesian War is depressingly relevant today. Thucydides was no polemicist either, but his message was clear: the exercise of power, however necessary it may seem, can lead a city-state-or a nation-into unforeseen danger...
...hope is to open the range of the senses To beyond the removals that thought makes. To the whole horizon, to the vastness of sunlight and circularity. I want a horizon centered, I want to stand, on a circular threshing floor, in a Peloponnesian plain. And deliver my senses there, for a permanent moment, to kind wind...
LYSISTRATA (Caedmon). Disgusted with the 20-year-old Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes attacked the Greek "hawks" with volleys of ribaldry. In the celebrated tale of how women ended the war with a sex strike, Hermione Gingold slyly makes double entendres sound quadruple as the Athenian matron who urges the ladies to stay out of the bedrooms until their men get off the battlefields...
Captain of Grenadiers. Despite the drawbacks of involvement, Schlesinger rejects the notion that the best historian is the one who has withdrawn to a perch above the heat and passion of life. Thucydides served as a general during the Peloponnesian War. Edward Gibbon, a soldier in his youth, found the experience valuable when he wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "The captain of Hampshire Grenadiers," Gibbon insisted, "was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire." Indeed, says Schlesinger, "until the last half of the 19th century, the great historians were, in one way or another, captains...
Just as Thucydides chose the Peloponnesian War, Namier took the 18th century as the text for all history-all his essays on the subject, some never published before, have now been collected in Crossroads of Power. In the first of these, he pleads for more study of the common men, who, he contends, shed more light than popular heroes on the life of the times. He proves his point with some engaging, subtle portraits. There was Daniel Pulteney, who went into Parliament to gain immunity from arrests for debts and stayed to poke fun at the pretensions of his fellow...