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There was a time, long before the age of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, when world leaders didn't risk their careers surreptitiously pursuing sex. They pursued it openly and risklessly. The Roman biographer Suetonius had this to say about the Emperor Augustus: "His friends used to behave like Toranius, the slave dealer, in arranging his pleasures for him--they would strip grown girls of their clothes and inspect them as though they were for sale...
...wide open. There is a human need, perhaps especially in a culture that routinely pits each against all in a relentless competition for parking spaces and aisle seats, to achieve the ecstatic merger with the mass represented by the wave or the chop. Besides, if this is the old Roman bread-and-circuses ploy, someone seems to have left out the bread...
...Super Bowl weekend may be the optimal moment to reflect on the true reason for that empire's fall--which, it could be argued, was not decadence, Christianity or post-orgy bulimia but rampant sports mania. At the height of the empire, the stadium was the centerpiece of every Roman town, dwarfing mere housing and temples. Loyalty to the chariot-racing leagues, with their colorful banners, eclipsed all political passions. When the barbarians attacked the gates of the Roman city of Hippo, no one much noticed because the groans of the dying soldiers on the wall were almost drowned...
...LATEST IN BELATED APOLOGIES In 1997 the Roman Catholic Church finally said it was sorry for collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. With the millennium around the corner, repentance is on the rise. Last week two more late apologies trickled...
...100th anniversary of Emile Zola's article "J'accuse," France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologized for its anti-Semitic editorials during the Dreyfus affair...