Greece
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Greece’
Plutarch tells us how Alexander the Great came to bond with Bucephalus, the mighty stallion that bore him to so many victories.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, probably written early in the second century, compares the characters of various great men of classical Greece and Rome. Among them is Alexander the Great, the young King of Macedon who in the latter part of the fourth century BC conquered cities and peoples from Egypt to India. His horse was Bucephalus, a mighty stallion that took some conquering too.
Hassan slipped across to Ithaca because it was in British hands and the Turkish authorities on the Greek mainland must not know what he was going to do.
The British liberation of the Ionian Islands during the Napoleonic Wars presumably displeased the French, and was no doubt disquieting for the Ottoman imperial government that for over two centuries had occupied the Greek mainland. But it was good news for Hassan. He wanted to be baptised a Christian, and for reasons of his own it was imperative that the Turkish authorities know nothing about it.
God alone can save civilisation, said Socrates, when clever campaign strategists teach aspiring politicians how to play on the public’s hopes and fears.
Socrates has been telling Adeimantus (Plato’s brother) that it is almost impossible for a young man not to run with the crowd, because peer pressure is made even stronger by ‘sophists’ — educators and opinion-formers who work democratic assemblies as an lion-tamer works his cats, and who resort to ‘the gentle force of attainder, confiscation or death’ when words are not enough.
According to legend, when the Venetians tried to kidnap it the Holy Table of St Sophia in Constantinople made a dramatic escape.
In 1204, Crusaders sacked and desecrated Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire and most honoured See of the Greek Orthodox Church. For almost sixty years thereafter, the communion Table in the grand basilica of Holy Wisdom (Agia Sophia) suffered itself to be used for Roman Catholic services, but in 1261 the retreating Latins tried to carry it away with them to Italy, and enough was enough.
In 480 BC Leonidas, King of Sparta, frustrated the advance of Xerxes the Persian just long enough to change the course of the war — and history.
In 480 BC, the Persian King Xerxes (r. 486-465 BC) led a campaign to punish the sovereign city-states of Greece for their refusal to join his vast and dictatorial empire. An enormous Persian army recruited from all over Asia reached the eastern mainland late in August, only to find four thousand preening Greeks barring the way.
A headstrong Irish boy became part of the Greek resistance movement that won independence in 1832.
At sixteen, Richard Church (1784-1873) ran away from home in Cork and enlisted in the British Army. He made a name for himself liberating the Ionian Islands from Napoleon in 1809, and formed two new Greek regiments there in British pay. So when a favourite recruit wrote to him in 1826, pleading for help, he could hardly refuse.