Word: peloponnesian
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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 Despite the drawbacks of involvement, Schlesinger rejects the notion that the best historian is the one who has withdrawn to a perch above the heat and passion of life.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...
...Egyptian setback forced Athens to abandon her Peloponnesian campaign and concentrate all her resources on reversing the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, to halt the disintegration of her hegemony in the Aegean...
...Persian Wives. A century after the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) all but destroyed the city-state, Macedonia's Alexander steered Hellenism off on another tack. Under the tutelage of Aristotle, he envisioned the brotherhood of man in a single universal state to which, in Toynbee's view, the earlier Hellenes had been so suicidally blind. In carving out his empire, he directed 80 of his highest-ranking officers to marry Persian women. But the experiment in marital one-worldism was shortlived. The Hellenic world continued to writhe in violent separatist agonies until Rome...