Word: sparta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nick was about as nice as an old man with a dislocated hip can be. Despite what is typically an extremely painful problem, he was pleasant, talkative and charming. His interests lay in the history of his native Sparta and in the making, extolling and drinking of large amounts of the well-known (and in my limited experience, best-avoided) pine-resin-laced traditional Greek wine retsina. Trained by decades of exposure to the resinous brew, Nick's brain and liver now presented us with an unusual difficulty: they had become so good at detoxifying his system that...
...Greek's main subject is the costly, misguided 5th century B.C. war in which invading Persian forces were eventually repulsed by a united Athens and Sparta. Kapuscinski gets hooked by his ancient predecessor's storytelling skills. "As I immersed myself increasingly in Herodotus' book, I identified more and more, emotionally and cognitively, with the world and events that he recalls," writes Kapuscinski. "I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan, and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny of troops in Congo...
...panels. The movie, true to the actual Spartan tradition of emancipated womanhood, promotes Gorgo (played with a kind of stalwart sensuality by Headey) to a co-starring role, allowing her to take fatal revenge on a wicked politician who had sodomized her. In the book, Leonidas thought Sparta was always an ideal worth dying for. In the movie, Gorgo's beauty, strength and courage give him something to live...
...timing of the computer-generated film, which depicts the ancient confrontation of Sparta and the Persian empire at the Battle of Thermopylae, is certainly inauspicious. It falls on the eve of Norouz, Persian new year, a time when Iranians typically gather in proud celebration, observing rites that date back over 3,000 years, way before Islam, to the age of Zoroastrianism, when their ancient land produced the world's first monotheistic religion. It is not a particularly welcome season to be portrayed as pillaging, deranged savages. Since the entire country will be on two weeks of official holiday, there will...
...Rather than philosopher-kings, Leonidas’ actual Sparta was a society of fighter-kings, where “equals” were the fearless warrior class bred to serve the hawkish state. In fact, the state provided hordes of slave workers, helots, to work the lands of “equals.” Sparta’s economic and social arrangement was built around the assumption that colonized cities would be enslaved and, thanks to their labor, Spartan armies would be fed and clothed. How is that for an “age of freedom?...