Word: sparta
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Smarting under the defeat of Marathon, Persia's great Xerxes crossed the Hellespont on a bridge of boats in the summer of 480 B. c., and marched through Thessaly. Herodotus recorded that he had 1,800,000 men; modern historians say about 180,000. Leonidas, king of Sparta, met him with only 7,000 men at Thermopylae, a narrow strip of dry shore between the cliffs of Mount Oeta and the swampy border of the Maliac Gulf. Hearing that a big detachment of Persians had found a way around the pass, Leonidas sent 5,000 soldiers to head them...
...pupils was Critias, who, Professor Winspear says, "had been a young man of democratic sympathies" before he fell under Socrates' influence. Critias became the Adolf Hitler of his day. When Athenian aristocrats, with Sparta's help, established an oligarchy, Critias led "the notorious and bloody reactionary dictatorship of the Thirty," which executed some 1,500 Athenians. When Athenian democrats returned to power, they decided "to hew the head off and not hack the limbs," condemned Socrates to death...
Died. Lieutenant Lansing C. ("Denny") Holden, 42, famed World War flying ace. soldier of fortune, archeologist, architect and Technicolor expert; when a New York National Guard plane crashed near Sparta, Tenn. Also killed in the crash was another famed War flier, Lieutenant Raymond W. Krout...
MARY ALLEN GRANT Sparta...
...antiwar; 4) it is funny. In The Impregnable Women, Author Linklater follows his model with near-sighted intensity. Lady Scrymgeour puts a stop to the war between Great Britain and France with as much zeal and dispatch as Lysistrata put a stop to the war between Athens and Sparta. The Impregnable Women is less light-headed than either Lysistrata or Author Linklater's earlier books. It exhibits his glib facility for treating outrageous events, but his admirers may be disconcerted to find that he possesses a moral sense. And they will agree that Aristophanes did the same thing better...