Word: rome
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...Observing the self-congratulatory excesses of Bicentennial America, some pop historians have found the empire's obituary a bit premature. Edward Gibbon's celebrated attribution of Rome's fall to "the triumph of barbarism and religion" has been supplanted by a more trenchant aphorism. "The decline of Rome," wrote Gibbon, "was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness...
...parallel decline of the modern West. Oswald Spengler believed that the historical cycle-both Roman and industrial-ends in megalopolis, where man coheres "unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter of fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful ..." Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental A Study of History, charted Rome and America through similar cycles of triumph, disintegration and collapse; like the empire of Augustus and Tiberius, imperial America could end in "a schism in the soul...
...became court painter to George III. That a colonial could bring off such a feat was regarded as singular. It turned him into a precocious father figure for later Yankee expatriates, notably Copley and Stuart. Here was their lesson in making it: the teen-age limner who, thanks to Rome and practical ambition, rose to become the second president of the Royal Academy. In fact, West was by temperament an ideal official artist: studious, methodical, competent, a bovine draftsman. But his neoclassical work, done under the first impact of Naples and Rome, is another matter: the small sketch for West...
Died. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, 85, pioneer archaeologist, author, lecturer, star of TV shows like The Grandeur That Was Rome, and, as the Manchester Guardian once sniffed, "Secretary to the British Academy when he's not on television"; in Leatherhead, England. Wheeler supervised excavations in the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan and over a wide area of Roman Britain. He believed in King Arthur, and in southwestern England his diggers unearthed bits of pottery and knives they thought came from Camelot...
...Games have previously posed problems for the Taiwanese. In 1959 the I.O.C. voted to eject the Chinese National Olympic Committee, as Taiwan's members were then known, in an initial attempt to add mainland China to the organization. In the 1960 Rome Games the Taiwanese participated under a compromise similar to the one they rejected last week. Later, the I.O.C. accepted the name Republic of China, and in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 Olympics the Taiwanese took part under that designation...