Word: romanic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meeting last week between Pope Benedict XVI and leaders of the global Jewish community served to ease the tension between the two religions, caused by the Pope’s decision to reinstate four previously excommunicated bishops back into the Roman Catholic Church. In particular, the reinstatement of Bishop Richard Williamson has outraged Jewish leaders, who point to his public skepticism of the Holocaust as evidence of anti-Semitism. Many have called for the Pope to re-excommunicate Williamson from the church. While the Pope’s efforts to meet with Jewish leaders in order to explain his decision...
...Williamson are disgusting. Yet they are simply not, under any possible reading of canon law, the point on which communion with the Catholic Church is decided. The Catholic Church states that communion requires belief in Catholic doctrine, association with one’s fellow Catholics, and submission to the Roman Pontiff...
...Romans themselves had few qualms about incorporating chemical warfare into their tactics. Roman armies routinely poisoned the wells of cities they were besieging, particularly when campaigning in western Asia. According to the historian Plutarch, the Roman general Sertorius in 80 B.C. had his troops pile mounds of gypsum powder by the hillside hideaways of Spanish rebels. When kicked up by a strong northerly wind, the dust became a severe irritant, smoking the insurgents out of their caves. The use of such special agents "was very tempting," says Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist and author of Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion...
...Written in India a century later, Kautilya's Arthashastra, one of the world's earliest treatises on war and realpolitik, advocates surprise night raids and offers recipes for plague-generating toxins, but it also urges princes to exercise restraint and win the hearts and minds of their foes. The Roman military historian Florus denounced a commander for sabotaging an enemy's water supply, saying the act "violated the laws of heaven and the practice of our forefathers...
...Even in antiquity, many feared the lurking consequences of unleashing what we now call chemical weapons - indeed, the ancient Greek tale of Pandora's box offers a continuing metaphor for their use. And its moral proved true in the collapsed tunnels of Dura-Europos: among the Roman bodies, James spied one corpse set aside from the rest, which wore differing armor and carried a jade-hilted sword. This was a fallen Persian soldier, James concludes, also asphyxiated by the gas. The warrior who released the poison very likely succumbed...