|
|
|
Newsletter 38December 2004
We wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2005
Prometheas’ Greek Movie Night
On Friday, November 19, 2004, 8:00 p.m. Prometheas showed the Greek movie Dekaptentavgoustos at St. Katherine’s Church, at Falls Church, VA. More than 100 people attended and virtually all left very satisfied with the movie and Prometheas' efforts. The movie reflected contemporary Greek life social issues and presented them with a flare and humor. Strong interest in follow-up movies was expressed; we plan to bring another movie early next year.
Articles on the recently released movie “Alexander”
'Alexander': A Crying
Shame By Stephen Hunter If you played a word-association game with "Alexander the Great," you'd probably come up with "conqueror," "king," "warrior," "legend," "despot," "wastrel" or "killer." Unfortunately, Oliver Stone has chosen to build his epic of the Macedonian military genius around a word highly unlikely to make the list: "crybaby." In Stone's view, this is a highly neurotic young man whose emotions, far from being repressed or disciplined, as one would expect of a great soldier of the 4th century B.C., are worn on his sleeve, except, of course, that he doesn't have sleeves, the shirt still being two millennia down the road. So he wears them on his wrist -- and it's a limp one. That's the weirdest aspect of the extremely weird, if absurdly expensive, movie. Stone gives himself much credit of "telling the truth" about Alexander's bisexuality as if it's some progressive badge of honor, but at the same time he can't get away from the cruelest, least imaginative stereotyping: His Alexander, as expressed through the weepy histrionics of Colin Farrell, is more like a desperate housewife than a soldier. He's always crying, his voice trembles, his eyes fill with tears. He's much less interesting, except as a basket case, than Richard Burton's Alexander of far less enlightened times -- 1956 -- in Robert Rossen's "Alexander the Great." Burton got Alexander's dissipation, but also his martial spirit; this was, after all, one of the great light-cavalry commanders of all time and a general who fought by leading his troops, sword in hand, not directing them from some safe hill. But in this one you think: Teri Hatcher could kick this twerp's butt. In many ways the movie feels 50 years old already. It offers the standard 1950s melodramatic theory of Alexander's sexual orientation: the scheming, sexualized, domineering mother, and the distant, uncaring father. So much for today's theories of genetic predetermination. Yet at the same time, it fails to account for what was remarkable about Alexander, rather than what was not. His bisexuality, after all, is fairly commonplace in the world of this movie, while his will to conquer, and his skill in actually bringing it off, are not. But we never see what drives him. He never projects much in the way of ambition or vision; his fixation is always emotional, and the occasional attempts to match his motives to his accomplishments don't resonate. Equally, we never sense his animal magnetism -- Farrell showed more on Letterman on Monday night than he does in three hours of world conquest -- or his leader's charisma. He seems to motivate by pouting or holding his breath. The movie lacks any convincing ideas about Alexander. Stone advances but one, the notion that Alexander was an early multiculturalist, who wanted to "unify" the globe. He seems not to recognize this as a standard agitprop of the totalitarian mind-set, always repulsive, but more so here in a movie that glosses over the boy-king's frequent massacres. Conquerors always want "unity," Stalin a unity of Russia without kulaks, Hitler a Europe without Jews, Mao a China without deviationists and wreckers. All of these boys loved to wax lyrical about unity while they were breaking human eggs in the millions, and so it was with Alexander, who wanted world unity without Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Turks and Indians. It has the same biopic failings as any MGM product of the mid-'30s, in that it rushes from high point to high point, it synopsizes (he fought dozens of battles; it dramatizes only two) and it whitewashes truth (Alexander's ruinous retreat from India gets about four seconds). The mechanism of the plot is trite: Ptolemy, one of A-team's leading generals, now grown august and stentorian as only Anthony Hopkins can project august stentorianism, recalls the days of Alex as he dictates his memoirs. Yak yak yak, blah blah blah. Hopkins's Ptolemy is a wordy old geezer, and his prose style, as crafted by Stone himself and co-writers Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis, has that kind of purple glaze Hollywood has always used to signify "in olden times." Other trite old-timey signifiers include too much Maybelline eyeliner (and I'm talking about the guys!), too many subtitles in a font that might be called Greco-Roman 36-point Bodoni, with V's for U's, and thunderous bad battle music that seems to have been composed only for trumpet and trombone. As a director of performance, Stone is hopeless. For one thing, Farrell so overacts with the wah-wah-wahs gushing that none of the other young Greek and Macedonian generals makes an impression. Since all these young men are stunningly handsome, in shaggy hair and cool clothes, it's sort of like hanging out with a rock band. Musicians, however, don't have to have personalities, while characters do. Alexander's great love was said to be Hephaistion, who is played in the film by Jared Leto, but unless you know Jared Leto by face, even late in the movie you'll have no idea which one he was. I thought he was this other guy, equally handsome, equally vapid, equally unmemorable, whom Alexander prongs with a spear in a drunken rage late in the movie. But that was some other guy. Then comes the moment when we Meet the Parents. Brother, talk about Christmas with the cranks! Dad -- the Macedonian king Philip, from whom Alexander inherited the tiny empire he was to build into a gigantic one -- is played by Val Kilmer in hearty barbarian mode. He seems to have wandered in from a remake of "The Vikings," shooting in the next Moroccan village down the coastline. Loved the one-eyed thing, which appears to be a Stone fetish. The movie is full to brimming with one-eyed men, which demonstrates two things: The Greek battle helmets had eye slots, and there was extra money in the makeup budget for putty. Then there's Angelina Jolie as Mom. Really, words fail me here. But let's try: Give this young woman the hands-down award for best impression of Bela Lugosi while hampered by a 38-inch bust line. Though everyone else in the picture speaks in some variation of a British accent, poor Jolie has been given the Transylvanian throat-sucker's throaty, sibilant vowels, as well as a wardrobe of snakes. She represents the spirit of kitsch that fills the movie, and with all her crazed posturing and slinking, it's more of a silent movie performance than one from the sound era. Theda Bara, call your agent. And finally, the battles. Hollywood should realize that these big tiff things aren't nearly as impressive as they once were, particularly in the aftermath of three years of Iron Age combat apotheosized in the great "Lord of the Rings" pictures; when you've seen Orcs and hobbits fighting for the future of the world, it's a little hard to get excited about Persians and Greeks fighting over someone's imperial hubris 2,300 years ago. To be fair, the film does a pretty good job of explaining and dramatizing the tactics of Gaugamela (thought to be near Mosul, Iraq, today), where the clever Alexander, with 40,000 men, outthought and outfought Darius III's 200,000, including a daring cavalry strike (which Alexander himself led) that drove Darius from the field. But there's nothing singular here. When you see what the Chinese are doing with action (in the upcoming "House of Flying Daggers") and even what younger and more inventive American directors are doing, these fights seem very much a part of the rest of the movie. It's the same-old, same-old of charging into battle from half a century ago. Even amplified by CGI, which can multiply a thousand extras into 40,000, nothing in the war-making feels unique. We don't learn anything new about this kind of fighting and the imagery -- bigger in scale but not bigger in vision from the past -- feels stale. The one fresh image, that of Alexander on horseback rearing at an enemy pasha on elephantback, has been diluted of its power by overexposure on television ads. Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in "Alexander," it doesn't engage in the least. Alexander (173 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for battle violence and sexual scenes and themes. © 2004 The Washington Post Company November 14, 2004 History Was Just the Half of ItBy BOB BAKER
The setting was an uninhabited stretch of Morocco - far from the Persian village of Gaugamela in present-day Iraq, where the historic battle occurred in 331 B.C. And the messianic warrior Mr. Fox followed wasn't the 25-year-old Alexander but the actor Colin Farrell, who plays the lead in Oliver Stone's "Alexander," which has its premiere on Nov. 24. Still, as the horses advanced and the cameras rolled, Mr. Fox felt epiphanies flow through him. After decades of researching often-incomplete texts about Alexander's time, he was now empirically testing history. Yes, he sensed, you could charge with a lance without using stirrups. No, his body told him, you couldn't carry a shield in your other arm while riding. And what of the popular notion that Alexander guided his soldiers with battlefield commands? That, too, felt hollow in the noisy rattle of battle, with dust limiting a cavalryman's vision to the riders on either side. Later, Mr. Fox would become convinced that it was physically possible to run a man through with a lance from the back of a horse without losing the weapon. (Aim for the shoulder.) "A fantastic experience," said Mr. Fox, an experienced horseman who demanded his on-screen riding appearance as a condition of serving as Mr. Stone's chief historical consultant. "As a historian you're always trying in your mind to imagine how things might have been." Historical films routinely reinterpret or simply trash history. Indeed, Mr. Stone is a pariah in some quarters for his conspiratorial assertions in "J.F.K." and "Nixon." But the filming of the Battle of Gaugamela appears to have been a more complex experience, one in which there was often no historical consensus, forcing Mr. Stone and his consultants to extrapolate their grand movie reality around an earnest synthesis of the authentic and the plausible, with at least a small dollop of the merely cool. By putting more than 1,000 actors and extras in classic Macedonian battle formations on the Moroccan desert, along with chariots, horses and camels, Mr. Stone set in motion scores of questions about what it meant to be a soldier two millenniums ago, ranging from massive to technical to trivial: How did Alexander trick a Persian army four times the size of his 50,000-man force into stretching its flanks until a convenient hole opened? Why didn't the lethal scythe-wheeled chariots of Darius, the Persian king, do more damage? How fast could a syntagma of soldiers (16 rows of 16 men) move while carrying 16-foot-long, steel-tipped spears known as sarissas? Did infantrymen wear socks? Answering those questions fell largely to two opposites: Mr. Fox, 58, an academic (who is also a newspaper gardening correspondent), and Mr. Stone's longtime military-battle adviser, Dale Dye, a 60-year-old retired Marine captain who is generally skeptical about historical scholarship. As Mr. Dye had done on many other film sets involving combat - his credits include "The Thin Red Line," "Saving Private Ryan," "Starship Troopers" and Mr. Stone's "Platoon" - he put cast members and extras, including hundreds of Moroccan military men on loan from the government, through a three-week "boot camp" that included sword fighting and practicing with other archaic weapons, as well as nighttime history lectures. The battle they sought to recreate had a mythic quality: Alexander's army had twice before clashed with Darius and won. The third victory spelled the defeat of the Persian Empire, gaining Alexander control of Asia en route to his conquest of 90 percent of the known world - all before his death at 32. Mr. Dye, who would direct some of the scenes in the 11-minute-long Battle of Gaugamela, was unabashed in suggesting to Mr. Fox that insights gained from putting a mock army into the field would be more credible than the descriptions of historians. Part of the problem - for scholars as well as directors - is that none of the 20 accounts of Alexander's life believed to have been written by his contemporaries have survived. The next closest accounts were written four centuries or more after Alexander's death, according to Mr. Fox, who describes his own Alexander biography as more a "search" for the general than a narrative of his life. "I don't give a [expletive] about what the ancient sources say," Mr. Dye said in an interview in his suburban Los Angeles home, which doubles as a personal military museum and library. "I went into this in the sole belief that the infantrymen had the same heart and soul in his job as the guy walking around Baghdad now." Mr. Fox had been retained by Mr. Stone in 2002 after a meeting in which the director, long enamored by the idea of making an Alexander movie, peppered the professor with questions. Mr. Stone, a man famously drawn to audaciousness, agreed to Mr. Fox's request that he be cast in the lead group of Alexander's cavalry. But the director balked at Mr. Fox's other demand: a screen credit that began "And introducing ... ." "There are two types of Alexander historians," Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. "One group looks back from its own deeply held moral values about international relations and regards Alexander as a person they must reduce to a wanton aggressor. The other group of historians wonder what it was like to be in his entourage and to see with him. I belong more in the second camp; how can you ever know if you never had a chance to charge as part of a massive army without stirrups through the desert riddled with scorpions?" Mr. Fox acknowledged there were often not enough hard facts to counter Mr. Dye's desire to extrapolate. "We come from two completely different universes," Mr. Fox said. "Dale is a soldier, and I really respect that, I love talking to him, but for him to say 'all those [historians] make it up,' I don't believe that." One example of Mr. Dye's contribution to the battle can be seen when Alexander's troops "mousetrap" a scythed chariot - a horse-drawn vehicle whose wheels could cut down many infantrymen at once. Mr. Dye said he was looking for a scene that would illustrate the flexibility of the syntagma formation. He had read that Darius's chariots had not played a role at Gaugamela. Since he had also read that Darius believed his chariots could break the back of Alexander's infantry, Mr. Dye made what he calls "a tactical leap" - inferring that Alexander had created a defensive maneuver. The scenario, in which Mr. Dye consulted with a cavalry expert who works for his company, Warriors Inc., went like this: When the commander of a syntagma recognized a chariot was rolling toward his men, he would signal them to deploy a trap. The lines of men in the middle of the syntagma would shuffle right or left to create an opening to lure the horses. The animals would be drawn into the gap because the soldiers on both sides of the gap would hold their sarissas in a down position, intimidating the animals. At the end of the gap, the last four rows of infantry had remained in position. On command they would raise their sarissas in an attack position, causing the horses to lurch to a halt. "Skirmishers" outside the syntagma would enter the ranks, gut the horses and kill the Persian riders. The syntagma, its formation intact, would move forward to continue battle. There is no historical evidence that this tactic was ever used, as Mr. Fox notes in a newly published book about the making of "Alexander." It was just as likely, Mr. Fox suggested, that some infantrymen threw javelins at the chariots or dragged their riders off them. Similarly, Mr. Dye's insistence on using 256-man syntagmas was not historically grounded, Mr. Fox writes. "Nobody knew, because nobody had seen a full phalanx [of syntagmas] in action since Macedon's defeat by Rome in the mid-second century B.C." Mr. Dye said: "You reach a point where it's anybody's guess, so you apply a 'soldier's template.' Our view is that soldiers aren't stupid. They do what works. That applies to everything from the Peloponnesian Wars to 'Star Wars.' " Similarly, Mr. Dye inferred - and the battle scene reflects - that Alexander's commanders used a system of bugles or drumbeats, visual signs and messengers to communicate marching orders to each group of 16 soldiers during the fog of war. That is one explanation for the coordination required to execute Alexander's battle strategy at Gaugamela: Feinting an attacking maneuver with his right flank, drawing Darius's soldiers to the Persian left flank and ultimately causing a gap to open in the Persian center. That allowed Alexander's troops to pour through and nearly kill Darius, who fled. Mr. Stone said the difference in worldviews between Mr. Fox and Mr. Dye was healthy. "If you look at all the sources, they never take you all the way through the battle. To this day I can't answer [what happened]." All the movie can do is "put you there," he said, "the way 'J.F.K.' allowed me to put myself in Dealey Plaza." What he wanted the Gaugamela scene to communicate, Mr. Stone said, was the brilliance of Alexander's strategy (in a 12-minute scene on tactics and preparation the night before the battle), a leader's sense of destiny (Alexander is said to have believed he descended from Zeus) and the foolishness of youth. Riding in the front line in the film, Alexander is knocked off his horse (another extrapolation) and saved by his men. "It's the madness of life that people sometimes blunder into history," Mr. Stone said. "At Gaugamela, he was a cocky young man. He loses his horse, his life is saved, but he's still going for the gold," by one report coming as close as 25 yards to capturing Darius but stopping when his commanders warned him that to continue the chase could put the rest of his army in jeopardy. "There's a wonderful truth to that,'' Mr. Stone said. "Keep trying." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Book Reviews
Arms and the Man Reviewed by Tracy Lee Simmons ALEXANDER THE GREAT The Hunt for a New Past By Paul Cartledge. Overlook. 368 pp. $28.95 THE VIRTUES OF WAR: A Novel of Alexander the Great By Steven Pressfield. Doubleday. 348 pp. $24.95 Alexander the Great reached the limits of the known world and, as he surveyed the wastes stretching to the horizon before him, wept in despair because he had no more worlds to conquer. Or so the tale goes. Whether or not he did this, he should have. No other story quite captures the high bluster that posterity has bestowed upon the greatest of ancient warriors. Alexander was the Western world's first Byronic figure, cloaked in myth, the yearning romantic and the national hero who achieved a binding world unity even while slaughtering hundreds of thousands who stood in his path. He struts the stage as one of those colossal characters of the past, like Caesar and Napoleon, who would fit just as comfortably -- and perhaps more plausibly -- within the pages of epic or fable. Yet, like those other figures, Alexander generously saved poets and novelists the trouble of creating him. But his overarching fame hasn't prevented platoons of historians, too, from feeling obliged to keep his image in mint condition. Like many another figure who has passed from history into legend, Alexander the Great presents different sides of himself to each generation. As Paul Cartledge, a Cambridge classicist heretofore best known for his pioneering work on Sparta, reminds us, scholars in the past have tended to favor one or another view of Alexander as definitive: the master military tactician, the dutiful and destiny-driven son of Philip of Macedon or even, less flatteringly, the alcoholic. And all views are predictably incomplete. Cartledge has chosen to highlight Alexander the Hunter, the man whose entire life can be explained as a quest for the next quarry. In so doing, Cartledge has produced a book that may be the most accessible introduction in print; though scholars may profit from this study, the general reader out for essential knowledge is particularly well served. He has combed meticulously through the classical sources left to us -- Arrian, Plutarch and Diodorus of Sicily, among others -- and combined them with the recondite cullings of modern scholarship to produce an amazingly solid, balanced and evocative view of the man behind the image on the coins. There is little dispute about the chronology of his life and time, and Cartledge spends the early chapters acquainting novices with Alexander's meteoric life. Born in 356 B.C., the privileged son of the king of Macedon was tutored as a youth by Aristotle himself -- possibly the most impressive bit of home schooling on record -- but, opting for the active over the contemplative life, he sought to follow his father to power and, upon Philip's murder in 336, did. He quickly showed himself a ruler not to be trifled with. Within a year, in a ruthless flexing of imperial muscle, he had laid waste to Thebes, killing 6,000 and dragging 20,000 into slavery. Soon after, at the battle of Granicus, he murdered 15,000 of the captured in a show of raw brutality. He burnt the palace at Persepolis to the ground before making off with its treasures. Yet his hunger for conquest had only begun. Setting out from a subdued and secured Greece, Alexander conquered Persia by the age of 23. Ten years later, he had made it all the way to the Indus before his loyal soldiers, finally exhausted, refused to go any farther. Some guess that he had even wished to circumnavigate Africa, though we cannot know this for sure. He died in 323, at the age of 33, in circumstances still deemed suspicious, and the idea that he was treacherously done in hardly strains credulity. Alexander's was, as we might say now, a cinematic life, a fact of which we are about to be reminded as he takes his place in that tableau known as The World According to Oliver Stone. Students of history keen to take lessons from the ages can find instruction aplenty in the life of Alexander, especially -- for our day -- in his military leadership. If there's one overriding lesson we might take from Alexander's strategy, it's to be found in his ability to wage battle slowly and deliberately; he wasn't always wielding the machete. He was a master tactician. Wars leave brushfires of resistance, and bringing peace after the fighting stops was an exacting business. Pacification and assimilation of subject races took time, and the fierce conqueror owned the patience to wait. But then the price paid for his peace -- and for the political unity for which he is lionized -- was slaughter and enslavement. Looked at in this light, Alexander's sword-won empire was not the harmonious multiethnic land that his latter-day apologists, from the 19th century till today, have wished to advance. Cartledge rarely leaves the world of scholarship on flights of fancy. Despite his subtitle, The Hunt for a New Past, he never wanders too far afield -- and nowhere that the evidence doesn't take him. With an illuminating appendix, itself a fine essay on the historiography of Alexander, he explores the sources of our knowledge of the man who came, conquered and saw. He also provides more maps and photographs than are common in books compiled by academics. Most satisfying, though, Cartledge ends by returning to the legend of Alexander with a précis of the many ways he has been praised or damned down the centuries. This book is a tribute to deep scholarship. It also carries the virtues of brevity as practiced by a confident writer. Those primarily wanting neither scholarship nor brevity can turn to Steven Pressfield's The Virtues of War, though it might be better to say that those who want scholarship thrown in with their drama can turn to this especially clever, if prolix, novel. For Pressfield, fictional settings of the classical world -- as in his earlier bestseller Gates of Fire -- are well-plowed ground; his research has been exhaustive, and he does this well, though I suspect only for certain kinds of readers. Daringly taking Alexander in hand as a created character, Pressfield makes him tell his own grandiose tale to his brother-in-law Itanes. This is a diverting, nicely sustained story with a snappy pace. Nonetheless, the confessional tone tends to make the great warrior seem a good deal more contemplative than he probably was. But once more we cannot know that, and Pressfield's guesses are probably as sound as anybody's. Dialogue fills the pages -- almost all of it, Pressfield admits, invented -- and the battle scenes are especially sharp and colorful. This story is a warrior's ethic, and we learn again that the "virtues of war" are paid for dearly. While scholarship may not be the point of this extravagant exercise of the imagination, scholarship has richly informed it. Whatever we happen to discover in these books about Alexander the Great, no knowledge can be more incisive than that this figure, no matter how historical, no matter how well documented, is now impossibly, irretrievably remote. Hence the legend. • Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of "Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin." He is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. © 2004 The Washington Post Company
Misc. News
Pope Returns Relics To
Orthodox Leader By Daniel Williams VATICAN CITY, Nov. 27 -- Pope John Paul II on Saturday handed over the bones of two saints to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, in hopes that the gesture will revive talks over unifying Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, two major forces in Christendom. The saints, John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen, are venerated as early Christian leaders by the world's 250 million Orthodox believers, but the Vatican had held their relics for centuries. The restitutions exemplified the doggedness of John Paul's efforts to reconcile with Orthodox Christianity and to continue his mission to forge pan-Christian unity. Bartholomew, who is patriarch of Constantinople, had asked for the relics when he visited the Vatican last June. The two church leaders described the ceremony Saturday as a step forward in Christian unity. In words read on his behalf by an assistant, John Paul described the restitution as a way to "purify our wounded memories" and "strengthen our path to reconciliation." Bartholomew called the return an act of goodwill that repaired an "ecclesiastical injustice" and that the event showed that "no insurmountable problems exist in the Church of Christ." Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church have been formally divided since 1054, when Pope Leo IX and eastern Patriarch Michael Cerularius excommunicated each other. The two churches had squabbled over rites, the wording of prayers, the use of unleavened bread in the Catholic Eucharist, territory and even the calendar. Vatican and Orthodox officials said Saturday's handover would be followed by discussions about bridging divisive issues. Chief among them, from the Orthodox point of view, is suspicion that the Roman church is trying to proselytize among Eastern believers, especially in Ukraine and Romania. In both countries, several Eastern church communities have declared themselves "in communion" with Rome, meaning that they retain their own liturgy and practices but accept the authority of the Catholic pontiff. The Vatican's welcome of these Uniate churches is an irritant to many Orthodox leaders. They regard Uniatism as a breach of the pope's oft-repeated assertion that Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy are brothers, not competitors. "In Orthodox terminology, we are stealing their sheep," said Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Kasper said it was not Roman Catholic policy to lure Orthodox believers, but that the Catholic Church had no choice but to welcome Christians who voluntarily accept Vatican stewardship. "We take seriously the free decision of people to unite with Rome," he said. Ignatios Sotiriadis, secretary of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in Athens in charge of questions of inter-Christian relations, said that "proselytizing is an old model for unifying the church." "Kasper's position is balanced, but we must make sure we live as brothers in fidelity to Christ. There is still a problem of trust," he said. The last major conference on relations between the two churches, which took place in Baltimore in 2000, was marred by heated arguments including a dispute over Uniate churches. Neither Kasper nor Sotiriadis predicted when new meetings of substance might resume. The ceremony took place in St. Peter's Basilica, which was packed with Catholic and Orthodox prelates and worshipers. John Paul and Bartholomew sat at the altar above the tomb of St. Peter, the first pope. The relics, visible inside crystal boxes encased by alabaster grating, lay on tables a few steps below the two church leaders. Plumed Swiss Guards stood sentinel, and hymns from a male choir echoed through the massive church. Both the pope and the patriarch kissed the containers, which Vatican ushers ferried between them. In Istanbul later Saturday, bells rang out in celebration as the remains were carried in a candlelight procession into the Cathedral of St. George, the Associated Press reported. Kasper had said earlier that he would fly to Istanbul on Bartholomew's plane for the ceremony there. The remains of Gregory Nazianzen were taken to Rome in the 8th century to safeguard them from a wave of attacks on iconography in Constantinople. The events surrounding the remains of the other saint, John Chrysostom, are particularly symbolic in the hostilities between the two churches. The bones were looted by Catholic marauders in 1204 from Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, during the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders plundered the city and set Byzantium, the Eastern Orthodox Christian empire, along the road to decline. Orthodox Christians regard the conquest of Constantinople as an example of Roman Catholic Church efforts to undermine its religious rival. John Paul apologized for the incident in 2001. Pope Innocent III had dispatched the Fourth Crusade to free Jerusalem from Muslim control, but monarchical participants conjured up an alternate plan. At the request of Alexius Angelus, a pretender to the Byzantine imperial throne, the Crusaders agreed to attack Constantinople. Alexius complained that his father, Isaac, was deposed unjustly. In return for being placed in power, Alexius promised cash and submission of the Church of Constantinople to Rome. Venice, the wealthiest city in Europe, supplied ships on credit for the invasion. At first, the scheme succeeded. Venetian, Frankish and other troops breached the city's defenses and routed the Byzantine forces. Isaac was enthroned alongside Alexius. But the joint emperors reneged on the pledge to pay off the Venetians. Byzantine rivals in Constantinople then revolted against Isaac and Alexius. The two died in a dungeon. Venetian leaders of the expedition realized that the only way to obtain the promised financial windfall was to conquer Constantinople outright. It was also an opportunity to crush a prime commercial rival. Three days of looting climaxed the assault. A Byzantine chronicler described the theft of holy images, destruction of relics, the ripping of jewels from chalices and use of the cups for drunken revelries. The victors divvied up the massive loot. Among the best known souvenirs harvested by the Venetians were four bronze horses that still stand atop the door of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. The Crusaders did not bother going on to Jerusalem. Innocent III was horrified and criticized papal representatives who abandoned the Holy Land to join in the establishment of the new "Latin" order in Constantinople. Nonetheless, Innocent accepted the outcome. The Crusaders set up their own kingdom, and effectively, if briefly, unified the Eastern and Western churches. Their rule, however, lasted only 50 years, until Greek avengers reconquered Constantinople. Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity then resumed their rivalry, their separation hardened by brutal war. © 2004 The Washington Post Company
Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota health scientist who discovered that saturated fat was a major cause of heart disease and championed the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, died Nov. 20 at his home in Minneapolis.
Ancel Keys, K Ration
Creator, Dies By Patricia Sullivan Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota public health scientist who invented the K rations consumed by millions of soldiers in World War II, discovered that saturated fat was a major cause of heart disease and championed the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, died Nov. 20 at his home in Minneapolis. He was 100. No cause of death was reported, but in recent years, Dr. Keys had several strokes and broke a hip. He was still at work earlier this year, analyzing data from his landmark epidemiological study, begun in 1958, of 12,000 middle-aged men living in Italy, the Greek islands, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and the United States. That "Seven Countries Study" provided evidence that a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, pasta, bread and olive oil and sparing of meat, eggs, butter and dairy products reduces the occurrence of heart disease. "He was a giant in the field of nutrition in a variety of ways," said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. "His studies held up in the big picture, yes. He missed some things that are important. Smoking and obesity didn't show up. But the basic conclusion is . . . the vast majority of heart disease is preventable." A compact, driven man, Dr. Keys was not always the easiest colleague. A tribute, cited by The Washington Post two years ago, said he could be "frank to the point of blunt trauma, and critical to the point of razor slash." His impatient behavior could be attributed, perhaps, to the fact that he accomplished so much in his long and extraordinarily varied career. Born in Colorado Springs, he was the nephew of movie actor Lon Chaney. His family moved to San Francisco just before the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires. After the disaster, they moved across the bay to Berkeley, where he was identified as one of the 1,528 "gifted" children studied by Stanford University researcher Lewis Terman. Before Keys was out of his teens, he worked in a lumber camp, shoveled bat guano in an Arizona cave, mined for gold and sailed to China on an ocean liner as a member of the crew. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and briefly took a management trainee job at Woolworth's but soon was back in school, earning a doctorate in biology from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He had a postdoctoral fellowship in Copenhagen, earned a second doctorate in physiology from Kings College in Cambridge, England, and worked briefly at the Mayo Clinic. He joined the University of Minnesota in 1936 and four years later founded its famous Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene, housed under the bleachers at the university's stadium. He led a scientific excursion to the Andes in 1935 to study the physiological effects of altitude. It was that research, he believed, which led to an assignment from the U.S. government at the start of World War II: design a lightweight but nutritionally robust ration for paratroops. The K Ration, named for him, was originally made up of items from a Minneapolis grocery store -- hard biscuits, dry sausage, hard candy and chocolate. Dr. Keys, by then a special assistant to the secretary of war, did other nutrition research, and his study on the physiology of starvation, conducted in Minnesota on conscientious objectors, provided the most complete record of the physiological, psychological and cognitive changes that come from food deprivation. In 1947, he noticed the increasing numbers of deaths from heart attacks, as noted in the newspapers' obituary pages, and began to study 283 businessmen from the Twin Cities, conducting examinations and taking blood samples every five years. It showed that smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol were frequently seen in men who had heart attacks. After a decade of work, he determined that saturated fat chiefly determined blood cholesterol levels, a breakthrough that stunned the meat-and-potatoes populace. That work led him to create the Seven Countries Study, which is still considered one of the most rigorous and complicated epidemiological studies ever undertaken. The insights, popularized in his bestseller "Eat Well and Stay Well," which he wrote with his wife, landed Dr. Keys on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. The profits from that book and two similar ones allowed the family to buy a home in Italy, where they lived when they weren't in Minnesota. He retired in 1972 from the university. He remained physically active for decades, walking, swimming and building stone walls. Survivors include his wife, Margaret Keys, of Minneapolis; a daughter, Carrie D'Andrea of Bloomington, Minn.; a son, Dr. Henry Keys of Voorheesville, N.Y.; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Ever the rigorous scientist, Dr. Keys was asked at his 100th birthday party in January whether his diet had contributed to his long life. He answered, "Very likely, but no proof." © 2004 The Washington Post Company
|
|
|
