Word: rebellion
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...wife (Estelle Parsons) quotes marriage advice from the Reader's Digest and his senile father jabbers from the porch swing. When the sheriff questions a young mountain girl named Alma McCain (Tuesday Weld) about a traffic violation, he sees her as a chance-perhaps his last -for freedom, rebellion, sexual gratification, maybe even love. Alma's father (Ralph Meeker) sees a chance for something too: protection for his illegal moonshine still. So he encourages his daughter to seduce the sheriff. Alma succeeds, and Tawes is forced to cover up for her father. Undone by all this, the sheriff...
Agathon, once an adviser to Lykourgos, has now been thrown into prison, officially for complicity in the Helot rebellion but actually because he represents a different, more serious threat to Lykourgos's rule. A leering, over-weight, foul-minded old mystic, constantly eating onions, farting, and peeking in windows to watch elderly couples making love. Agathon scorns the Spartan ideal and gleefully embodies its antithesis. The novel deals with how he got this way and how he views himself, the people he knows, the universe he inhabits. Gardner adroitly uses the device of alternating two manuscripts: Agathon's disjointed writings...
...before he became a seer. He tells us of his marriage to Tuka, the beautiful daughter of an Athenian nobleman at whose home he was tutored, of his involvement with the gross but practical Solon, of his fascination with the Helot Iona, who later becomes a leader of the rebellion. Interesting enough, but all this smacks of soap opera, and at any rate the young Agathon seems pale in comparison to what he becomes...
After Iona's husband is executed for treason, having shielded his wife's involvement in the rebellion, Agathon goes to seed. It is then that he starts compulsively laughing at the universe and having visions of the future...
...disturbances began Monday afternoon and continued into Tuesday night. They were the worst riots in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam's fourth largest city, since the 1966 student rebellion against the Ky regime...