The once and future king

January 26, 2015

The Greeks – who find themselves once again, or still, in economic straits – were scheduled to go to the polls Sunday, Jan. 25. So should it surprise you that Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who is fighting for his political life, has been busy invoking the name of his country’s hero, Alexander the Great?

Samaras is among those stirred by the excavation in Amphipolis in the region of Macedonia. The site contains the remains of a woman, two men, an infant and someone who was cremated. While they were no doubt figures of importance, they may not be Olympias, mother of Alexander, and various relatives, and the site is certainly not the tomb of Alexander, who may be buried under a mosque in Egypt.

But the presumed lack of a direct connection to Alexander has not stopped Samaras from evoking the memory of a man who set out from Macedonia at age 20 and conquered the known world. Everyone loves a winner. ...

New Year’s wisdom from RFK – and ‘the awful grace of God’

December 31, 2014

Spent a magical few days with my family – always too short of a good time – in suburban D.C. for Christmas and had the pleasure and privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery.

I hadn’t been there since I was a girl but as with anything that is ingrained, I found it washing over me, moving me as it did in the old days – the rows of crystalline marble headstones; the deep-veined names etched on them; the commanding views of the city that crown the serpentine climb to the Federal-style Arlington House, a.k.a. The Robert E. Lee Memorial, once the home of the gallant Confederate general and President George Washington’s descendants.

As I made the climb, I was struck by the grave markers, some containing a brief record of the departed’s military and civilian achievements, others containing nothing but a last name, the bearer’s deeds lost in time.

Along the way, I paused at the eternal flame that lights the graves of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, flanked by the graves of their first and last children, an unnamed baby daughter and son Patrick.

On the path to the left are the graves of JFK brothers Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a World War II bomber pilot, and Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, marked by simple white crosses – as is perhaps the most moving of the brothers’ graves, that of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

His faces a low gray wall that contains some of the words he spoke extemporaneously in Indianapolis the night of April 4, 1968 amid his presidential bid after he learned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Kennedy had been cautioned by police and aides against addressing those who had gathered, many of whom would be hearing about King’s death for the first time. But he decided to persevere, in one of the great, from-the-heart speeches – acknowledging the black crowd’s understandable anger toward King’s white assassin, James Earl Ray, and his own toward his brother John’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

That was vintage Bobby, and the reason you either loved or hated him but couldn’t sit on the sidelines and be dispassionate. He wasn’t afraid of raw emotions, afraid to say what everyone was thinking.

Nor did he deem it imprudent to quote Aeschylus to the throng. The ancient Greek poet-playwright of “The Oresteia” – recommended by his bookish sister-in-law, Jackie – became a favorite in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. ...

The once and future king

November 14, 2014

You would think that someone whose earthly life ended more than 2,000 years ago would be beyond controversy. But then look at Jesus. He’s still “a sign to be contradicted,” to quote the Gospels, almost two millennia after he was crucified.

So it is with Alexander the Great. Some 330 years before Jesus was born, this king of Macedon and hegemon of Greece conquered the Persian Empire, ushering in a Hellenistic age that would unite East and West. (The reason we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ” is because of the Alexandrian spread of the Greek language and culture.)

Such is the Alexander mystique – he never lost a battle but died at age 32 in Babylon, possibly of cerebral malaria – that he thrives in the imagination today as a metaphor for many things, including leadership from the front; the ultimate gay in the military (many consider him to have been the lover of his right-hand man, Hephaestion); and the tension between East and West.

That tension has escalated recently with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s decision to give waxworks of Alexander, his father, Philip II of Macedon and his mother, Olympias, pride of place in a new archaeological museum in the capital city of Skopje, which already has the world’s largest statue of Alexander in its central square.

A little background here...