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Good question – I'm actually not sure whether Greek or Roman statues were displayed fully-clothed, but my hunch would say “no”. The reason is that from the days of the early Greek kouroi (male) and korai (female) statues (600 B.C.), we see that the men were carved as nude figures, whereas the females were carved as clothed figures. Even into the Classical period, males such as the Doryphoros, are carved in the nude, but females, such as the caryatids on the Erechtheion at the Acropolis, are carved clothed. As far as I'm away, it was not until the Hellenistic period that females of high stature are depicted in the nude/naked, such as the Venus Pudica statutes.I suppose this doesn't prove anything, but why would the Greeks make carved clothing distinctions if they were going to clothe the statues anyway? Besides, nudity came to represent something heroic. We can understand this in another way by the nudity of figures in Greek vase painting - obviously those figures couldn't have been covered up![html]
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"Museo archeologico regionale paolo orsi, kore in calcare da monte casale, 570-560 ac." by sailko - Own work (my camera). Licensed under <a title="Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5
">CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.[/html][html]
[/html]The documentary did point to the sketch at Dura Europos (seen here), I think to illustrate that the Romans did see full armor in their enemies (and desire to form their own similar unit), as well as a fifth century(?) manuscript showing a picture of such a fully-armored Roman on horseback.I'm not sure what they would say about the lack of stirrups, or the lack of the high back saddle, both of which came about around Charmlemagne's time. They could probably have gotten by without the high back saddle (there wasn't any indication in the documentary that the cataphracts were involved in jousting) but the stirrup is another story.
I recently heard Charles Krauthammer's view on this (I'm paraphrasing his ideas here). He said that the White House may have been behind the push to keep impeachment talk in the news, which then forced Boehner to proclaim that impeachment was off the table. Now, Obama has the ability to do something drastic with immigration – something which would otherwise get him impeached – and the House would be in a difficult position to go back on its word.Did anyone else hear about this? I don't know if I buy it, but it's an interesting scenario.
I see it a bit differently. Each POTUS is going to try to exercise his authority to its full extent to either serve the nation and/or to push his policies through. In fact, if you're a president who is not doing this, you're probably going to be a weak president. It's almost inevitable that POTUS will rub elbows with Congress in this matter, so Congress has a right – we could perhaps say a duty – to oppose POTUS in court if he exercises authority which breaches separation of powers. Constitutional law is not always clear about the extent of POTUS' power, so we should expect SCOTUS to step in from time to time and clarify it. This is the way our system works.The problem with Obama is that a) he seems to have taken this idea too far, and b) he has also given himself the ability to refuse to execute laws he doesn't like (e.g. enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act). When a president has become rulemaker, executive, and arbiter of the laws he wants to enforce, then we have a problem.
Democrats are doing a very good job of destroying their own brand right now and I think Republicans should let them.
That's a good line. And you are right that most people likely don't understand the full implications of what Obama is doing. We could choose several things, but for now I'll simply point to Obama's modifications of Obamacare as being dangerous to the Separation of Powers. A site has tracked 24 changes that the Executive Branch has made so far, which does not include additional changes made/influenced by Congress or SCOTUS. Does this mean that in the future, POTUS will be able to get any general kind of legislation pushed through Congress, and then enforce it as he chooses so that it's effectively a different law than Congress passed?
I don't know what to say. On one hand, I find it almost *too* amazing that they found a cup that just so happens to belong to Pericles. I mean, think of the fact that there may have been 300,000+ people living in Athens in the mid-fifth century B.C…..the fact that the cup dates to the time that Pericles was living (rather than 300, 100, or even 50 years after his death)….and it seems kind of preposterous to think that we just so happened to have found a cup that Pericles actually used.On the other hand, the scholars who have been examining the cup must have considered these facts as well and still have concluded that it belonged to Pericles - being "99 per cent" sure. I do trust that they did their work when they made their findings public. Therefore, I don't want to dismiss their findings based on the fact of its rarity. In the end, this could be a really amazing find, or a case of archaeologists being duped/mistaken/premature in their conclusions.
I had heard many years ago that Homer may not have existed, so things like that wouldn't rattle me too much. The one listed in that article which is most striking to me is that Alexander the Great wasn't so “great”. Obviously “great” is a subjective term, but I seem to recall that he took courageous action on the battlefield which provides strong evidence about his heroic qualities. Now, he might have been short and stocky as the article puts it, but the portrait busts of him from the ancient world (I believe there were three different types) make him out to be somewhat appealing, physically.
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you said you were going to split all that wood, and then I thought you were pranking me because you said “the last time you seriously split wood was…”. So now I realize you are, in fact, cutting all that wood but you just haven't done it in a while.
I guess you had me fooled, then. Now I'm trying to figure out in my mind which muscles are worked by splitting wood.
I haven't had to split wood since I was a kid when my family lived in a more rural area. It's kind of a nice thing to do, especially come Fall. In the years since, I've lived in places which either didn't have wood-burning fireplaces or where it's more urbanized so wood is better off bought at the store.
Well I'm guessing you may need a chainsaw to cut those logs down a bit more before you split 'em with an ax…
I read an article recently about how in Brazil, you could walk down a street and tell how the game was going simply by listening, either to the TVs/radios on or the reaction of people in their houses. Probably a similar phenomenon to what you experienced in Germany.
Ok, you have a point about leg day. It's not quite as fun….but I suppose it does feel good once it's done! I have found that the more I regularly lift weights, the more I want to eat healthily to help my body. This is part of the appeal of lifting weights to begin with - it helps to order your life in more ways than one. Now, I feel good eating a dinner of steak on a bed of spinach. When I wasn't lifting, that kind of dinner would not have appealed to me. I'm not sure eating 1/2 lemon meringue pie would have ever appealed to me, though.
