Word: peloponnesian
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...Aristophanes, it seems "bawdy" and "ribald" more than sophomoric and thin. There's nothing except sexual silliness to its plot about a smart Athenian woman, Lysistrata (Judith Listfield) who forms a league between all Greek women to force their husbands--by withholding sex from them--to end the Peloponnesian war. The Dunster production takes Lysistrata a little more lightly than it was intended (Aristophanes wrote it during the Peloponnesian war) but so long as you expect only a pretext for laughs, you won't be gravely disappointed...
...first recorded amnesty was granted by Athens in 403 B.C. to most of those who had collaborated with Athens' Spartan conquerors after the Peloponnesian War. (The word itself is from the Greek amnestia, which means "forgetfulness.") The Romans, on occasion, continued the custom, which they called restitutio in integrum, and many other states since then have granted amnesty to achieve reconciliation after a civil war or a period of internal strife. France, which has seen more such conflict than most countries, has made amnesty almost a habit; the latest example occurred in 1968 when right-wing opponents of Charles...
...survived after its family life deteriorated," warns Dr. Paul Popenoe, founder of the American Institute of Family Relations. Harvard Professor Emeritus Carle Zimmerman has stated the most pessimistic view: "The extinction of faith in the familistic system is identical with the movements in Greece during the century following the Peloponnesian Wars, and in Rome from about A.D. 150. In each case the change in the faith and belief in family systems was associated with rapid adoption of negative reproduction rates and with enormous crises in the very civilizations themselves...
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...