NAPOLEONIC COMPLEX

Script No, 480, September 16, 2006

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte­

Back in June of this year [2006] the U. S. Interstate highway system celebrated its 50th anniversary. When it was built back in the 1950s one of the justifications for the immense project was national security. (It was named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways). Rapid troop movement within the country would be facilitated.

Another set of projects under way 150 years earlier had a similar goal. Napoleon Bonaparte was the multi-tasker par excellence. To help solidify his sphere of influence over France and much of Italy he would have to be able to move his forces quickly to anticipated trouble spots - no plans for Moscow yet - and the biggest bottlenecks were the passes through the French and Italian Alps. He knew that from experience. So, in addition to his many other projects - defensive works in Belgium, Italy and Poland, the harbor at Cherbourg, a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea (that one didn’t work out, then), and the beautification of Paris - the Corsican corporal undertook a roads project of his own.

The plan was to construct a broad carriage road along an alpine route that would penetrate the mountains between Switzerland and Italy at Simplon, and the French pass at Mont Cenis. The first or eastern would allow penetration close to the region around Milan and the more western would allow quick access to Turin.

Construction accounts and records are not readily available, but French engineers and road builders, working between the years 1803 and 1811, somehow managed to pull it off. On the outer fringes of the route Bonaparte had crews pushing roads through marshes and forests in north-eastern France and west-central Germany. In a time when most of the work was done by crude machines and brute strength the builders bridged ravines in the mountains and chopped passes through until carriages (and cannon, of course) could be sent rapidly back and forth between borders. It might take fifty winding miles of zig-zagging road to cover a crow’s flight of thirty and, although the eighteen-foot-width permitted three carriages to travel side-by-side, there were many sections where it took sixteen mules to pull them up and down the nearly perpendicular roadway. In the winter it was necessary to attach runners to the carriage wheels.

Several times a year the hands-on French dictator would make an inspection tour of the various projects he was pushing through western Europe. He’d stop at each work site and subject his project managers to a rigorous and minute examination of their progress, until he was fully satisfied with the work.

Back in 1804, the same year he became emperor, he wrote, "Men are only as large as the monuments they leave." He actually left several smaller ones - a hospice and barracks at Cenis and a triumphal arch (never completed) near Milan. Lord Byron had his own view of the engineering feat and perhaps, in an oblique dig, of its creator. “The Simplon is magnificent in its nature and its art – both God and Man have done wonders – to say nothing of the Devil – who must certainly have had a hand (or a hoof) in some of the rocks and ravines through and over which the works are carried.”

The Very First Timemaster Script

Broadcast: 10/26/96

© 1996 David Minor / Eagles Byte dminor@eznet.net

Welcome to Timemaster

This is David Minor, and in the weeks to come we’ll be time tripping, poking our metaphoric noses into the crannies and nooks of our planet’s ­busy history, seeing what and who we can turn up.

This week, let’s go back 172 years, to 1824, and see what writers were up to.

A number of authors entered the world this year, unnoticed by that same world, as all but royalty usually is.

In London, novelist Arthur Wilkie Collins, author of some of the earliest detective novels such as The Moonstone and The Woman in White, made his appearance. In an opposite corner of Europe, Serbian poet Branko Radicevic entered the world.

And in another Balkan nation, George Gordon Noel Byron, the poet Lord Byron, died in Missolonghi, where he had gone to lend his support to the Greeks fighting for independence from their Turkish overlords.

Those writers not making earthly entrances and exits were also keeping themselves quite busy.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was entering Connecticut’s Hartford Female Seminary, which had been founded by her older sister Catherine. Washington Irving was publishing his Tales of a Traveler, Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet was in the hands of his publisher.

But no one seems to have been so busy as U. S. novelist James Cooper. (He’d formally add the Fenimore to his name two years later, fulfilling a pledge made to his mother). In January, this former merchant seaman and three-year Great Lakes naval midshipman, having read Walter Scott’s sea romance The Pirate, he decided he’d show the reading public what an authentic and accurate sea story should be. He published The Pilot, a tale of the American Revolution, with daring naval exploits off the enemy coast of England (and in its manor houses). Four months later, in May, he was changing his New York City residence, heading northward — as has befitted Manhattan’s up-and coming, until recent decades — moving from 3 Beach Street to 345 Greenwich Street. In August he received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Columbia University.

Shortly afterwards he took a trip back upstate, escorting four English noblemen, one of whom, Edward Stanley, would become Prime Minister in the 1850s, on a tour of the area around the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. It was while the party was visiting Glens Falls that Cooper looked at the cataract there and said to himself, “I must place one of my old Indians here.” He did. The Indian’s name was Chingachgook, and the result was The Last of the Mohicans.

[ The falls have changed since then ]

New York City Timeline - 1610 through 1614

1610

State

A Dutch ship belonging to private merchant-traders travels up the Hudson River to trade for furs with the Mahicans.

Netherlands ** The approximate date Peter Stuyvesant is born in Peperga.

1611

City

Former Dutch lawyer Adrian Block explores Manhattan Island in the ship Tyger . He returns to Europe with a cargo of furs and two kidnaped Indians, who he names Orson and Valentine.

1613

Mar 27

Dutch merchants send the ship Fortuyn, captained by German explorer Hendrick Christaensen (Christiaenszoon, Christiaensen, Corstiaensen), and the Tyger, commanded by Adriaen Block, along with three other vessels, to the Mauritius (Hudson) River.

May

Christaensen and Block arrive off Manhattan. Block will sail along Long Island Sound, collecting and trading. Christaensen will sail up the Hudson to the Albany area, where he builds Fort Nassau, then returns downriver, erecting a few huts on Manhattan and preparing to winter over.

November

English captain Samuel Argall stops at Manhattan Island, forces Christaensen to lower the Dutch flag and raise the English one. ** Block returns to Manhattan Island in the Tyger, which is destroyed in a fire off the southern tip. A mutiny results in Block and Christaensz being abandoned. They establish a Dutch fur-trading post on Manhattan Island. Over the coming winter they build the 42-foot ship Onrust (Restless). They also complete "A Fugurative Map on Vellum".

England

The approximate date Charles Bridges is born in Canterbury. He will settle in New Amsterdam and work for Peter Stuyvesant under the name Carel Van Brugge.

Netherlands

New Amsterdam immigrant Jan Cornelissen is born in Rotterdam.

1614

City

Adrien Block explores the East River and Long Island Sound in the Onrust. He leaves Jan Rodriguez, a Santo Domingo mulatto, behind on Manhattan to trade with the natives, goes on to explore the lower reaches of the Connecticut River.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

MICE ABANDON BUILDING

Another slight change over the past year.

NY Times Architectural Historian Christopher Gray’s column

of February 17th of this year

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/realestate/21streets.html?hpw

relates changes in the National Broadcasting Company’s

711 Fifth Avenue building. The Disney store there has moved out.

The Times’ site shows the store’s marquee.

I got a shot of it a year ago, a slightly tighter shot – so here’s

Mickey, Minnie and Pluto - ready for one final close-up.

(Click on photo for an even closer-up)

New York City Timeline - BC through 1609

25,000 B. C.

The Manhattan area is inundated by the sea.

10,000 B. C.

Native Americans inhabit Manhattan island.

1200 B. C.

Woodland Indian habitations and burial sites are located on Lake Champlain, near Ticonderoga.

1100 A. D.

The approximate date of Indian settlements in the Brooklyn area.

1524

Apr 17

Explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, commissioned by France's Francis I, discovers, enters New York’s Upper Bay through the Narrows, between Staten Island and Brooklyn. He meets a party of Lenape Nayack Indians; relations are amicable.

1525

Black Portuguese navigator sailing for Emperor Charles V of Spain. arrives from Labrador, sails up the Hudson River (naming it the Deer, or San Antonio River) decides it doesn't lead to the Moluccas and sails back out again, continuing on to Florida.

1586

Deborah Dunch (later Lady Moody), the first female landowner in the New World, is born in London to Walter and Debora Dunch.

1597

September

Dutch merchant and New Netherland director-general Willem Kieft is born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to a Portuguese Sephardic family.

1602

March

Provincial governments of the Netherlands, along with local merchnts, form the United Netherlands Chartered East India Company (The Dutch East India Company or VOC, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). Trade routes are limited to around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Strait of Magellan.

1604

Apr 28

Brooklyn settler Joris Jansen de Rapalje, a Walloon, is born to Jean Rapareilles and Elizabeth Baudoin, in Valenciennes, France.

1609

Sep 2

English explorer Henry “Hendrick” Hudson, seeking a northeast passage to the Orient for the Dutch East India Company, anchors his ship the Half Moon in the lower end of New York harbor.

Sep 3

Hudson enters the Narrows.

Sep 4

Hudson anchors off southwestern Brooklyn, names the bay Gravesend. Canarsie Indian's canoes come out to see the Half Moon. He will name the Lenni-Lenape Indian's Eghquaons large island across the Nartrows Status Eylandt, in honor of the Netherland's Staats General.

Sep 5

Hudson sends a party to Long Island, where they meet with friendly natives and invite them for a visit aboard to trade.

Sep 6

Hudson sends a five-man crew under John Colman ashore on Long Island to explore. On their return to the ship they are attacked by two canoes full of natives. Colman is killed, two others injured. The survivors can’t find the Half Moon in the dark. Colman is buried at one of the following possible locations - Sandy Hook or the future Keansburg in New Jersey, on Staten Island, or in the Coney Island area of the future Brooklyn - the first recorded victim of violence in the general area of the future New York City.

Sep 7

Hudson takes two Indians hostage.

Sep 10

Hudson enters the bay.

Sep 11

Hudson anchors in the bay.

Sep 12

Hudson crosses upper New York Bay, purchases oysters and beans from the natives on Manhattan Island, and heads north into the Hudson River.

Sep 13

Henry Hudson anchors off the Yonkers area.

Sep 14

Hudson anchors off today’s West Point area. The two Indian hostages escape.

Sep 15

Hudson arrives in the Kingston area.

Sep 16

Hudson arrives in the Hudson area.

Sep 17

Hudson arrives in the Castleton area, home to the Mahican Indian’s Schotak (Schodack) village.

Sep 19

Hudson arrives in the Albany area.

Sep 23

Hudson leaves the Albany area.

Sep 24

The Half Moon runs aground on Upper Schodack Island in the Castleton area.

Sep 30

The Half Moon arrives in the area near West Point.

Oct 1

After a failed attempt by the natives to steal from the Half Moon Indians in

Haverstraw Bay attack the vessel. The crew kills two.

Oct 2

The Half Moon passes Nappeckamack (today’s Yonkers). Off Spuyten Duyvil Creek the

vessel is attacked by local Indians in canoes. Two of the attackers are killed.

Oct 4

Hudson sails for England.

© 2011 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Grand Central Terminal

© 2008 David Minor / Eagles Byte

MMG 103

Let it not be said that dramatist William S. Gilbert, who poked good-natured fun at almost everything else, couldn’t target himself and partner Sir Arthur Sullivan. When we take yet another look at the “Modern Major General” lyrics, we hear:

I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,

I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes!

Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,

And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.

We know what he’s referring to when he mentions Pinafore. But who were Gerard Dow and Zoffanies. I’m glad I asked. I’ll tell you. (That was about as subtle as a song cue.)

Gerard, or Gerhard Dow (variously spelled D-O-W or D-O-U-W) was a Dutch painter, born in Leyden on April 7, 1613. By the time he was fifteen, Dow had been apprenticed in painting on glass and engraving. He spent the next three years studying with the painter Rembrandt. His own early works were very much in the style of the Flemish master, but he soon developed his own style, probably a 17th century version of an Andrew Wyeth, for his paintings were described as displaying, “all the details...down to the most trivial.” Not being able to obtain brushes fine enough for his purpose, he manufactured his own. It’s said he spent five days painting a single human hand. Models soon became scarce - no one could sit still long enough. No one could touch him when it came to painting scenes lit by candles or lanterns, such as in The Evening School. Dow’s paintings brought high prices and the president of the Hague paid him a thousand florins a year for the right of first refusal. Dow died in 1680.

Johann Zoffany was born in Frankfort-on-Main in 1753, to the architect of the prince of Thurn and Taxis. Running away from home at the age of thirteen, Johann made his way to Rome, where he studied painting for the next dozen years before making his way to England in 1758. He struggled for a few years before royal commissions from George III and Empress Maria Theresa put him on the map. Speaking of the map, Zoffany was all over it. After spending time in Austria and once again in Italy, he traveled to India, where he painted for three years before returning to England, dying there in 1810. Dow and Zoffany certainly give the lie to the stereotype of the starving artist dying in poverty.

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

MMG 102

Helio Dolly

Class, be seated! It’s time for another session on the knowledge required to be Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major General. Our modern model tells us, “I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus.” Helio-who?

Attend. We touched on this august gentleman a while back, in our session on 3rd Century Roman emperors. Let’s take a closer look. You may remember (I didn’t) that Julia Maesa, maternal aunt of the emperor Caracalla, had her 14-year-old grandson Varius Avitus named emperor in 218 A. D. His mother was apparently no better than she should be, to use a old-fashioned expression, and it was rumored that the boy was named Varius because a number of candidates could be considered as the boy’s father. When Caracalla was murdered, Julia and Varius hied themselves off to western Syria, where he was soon appointed high priest of the god Elagabalus, a.k.a.
Heliogabalus, the boy’s new name. Several weeks after his appointment, Caracalla’s killer-successor Macrimus was defeated near Antioch (in today’s Turkey) and Julia had her grandson declared emperor.

He returned to Rome, had his Syrian god declared chief deity, and launched his own reign. What of the forementioned “crimes”? The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 delicately refers to “horseplay of the wildest description and...childish practical joking.” Not to mention, “shameless profligacy...to shock even a Roman public.”

We’ll maintain some of the encyclopedia’s delicacy - this is a family hour - but apart from personal depravity, Varius, now known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, had no trouble offending vast numbers of people. He did make an attempt to get women involved in politics, sort of. He allowed a woman on the floor of the Senate for the first time. It was his mother; that may have added to the insult. He established a women's senate, which immediately passed laws governing matrons in such weighty matters of state as who might wear gold or jewels on their shoes. He removed holy shrines, sold political offices, tortured and sacrificed human victims — much the usual catalogue of imperial Roman vices. How much of this is reputable documented fact, and how much is the product of political enemies and those who would write for supermarket tabloids today? It’s probably impossible to know. Suffice it to say, Heliogabalus was about as popular as ten plagues.

He eventually made the ultimate mistake; he meddled with the military. They turned on him, murdering him in a latrine where he was hiding, dragging his body around the Forum and throwing the weighted corpse into the Tiber. Sic semper tyrannis.

© 1997 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Title: MMG 101

“I am the very model of a modern Major-General.” If you were listening last Saturday, you may have heard those words from Pirates of Penzance, sung on the Sunshine Show. Most of you know the piece. But do you have the necessary knowledge to qualify for the post of modern major-general, at least as it existed in Victorian Times. We’ll begin this particular voyage of discovery today. We’ll skip a few of the more arcane pieces of knowledge, particularly the (pause) math bits. There’ll be no “equations, both the simple and quadratical”; no “binomial theorem...with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.” We’ll also have none of the “integral and differential calculus, or “scientific names of beings animalculous.” Count your blessings.

Let’s turn instead to another section of this military bragadoccio. The MMG goes on to state, “I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's.” We’re most of us quite familiar with the myraid tales, legends, musicals and theories about King Arthur. But who is this Caradoc. He must have been chosen by William S. Gilbert for some other reason than to just rhyme with “paradox.”

Actually, the rhyme proves to be rather apt. For there seem to be more than one Caradoc. Number One is the Welsh saint, who died in the year 1124. Onetime harp-player to King Rhys, prince of South Wales, one of the early Tudor clan, he was dismissed for losing one of the prince’s favorite greyhounds. He went off to serve the Bishop at Llandaff, in today’s Cardiff, where he became a hermit, eventually ending his days on an island off the Pembroke coast. He was never formally canonised, in spite of the intervention of the chronicler Gerald of Wales.

Caradoc Number Two turns up in the royal line of the Kings of Brittany in the fifth century. Number Three is the twelfth-century historian Caradoc of Lancaruan, who wrote a History of Cambria and a Life of Gildas, another British monk-historian. In the latter work Caradoc becomes one of the first writers to introduce Guinevere into the Arthurian legends.

Confusing? But hold. There’s a Number Four. It turns out that the name Caradoc is a Celtic form of the Roman name Caractacus. Caractacus is almost as much of a legend as Arthur. A British chieftan, he fought the Romans around 48 to 51 AD, until being captured, hauled off to Rome and executed.

Those of you who know the Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics well, can see where I’m going with this. For our moder major-general goes on to expound on his familairity with “ev'ry detail of Caractacus's uniform.” Confusing? It was probably meant to be.

© 1997 David Minor / Eagles Byte

MMG 101

“I am the very model of a modern Major-General.” - Words from Pirates of Penzance. Most of you know the piece. But do you have the necessary knowledge to qualify for the post of modern major-general, at least as it existed in Victorian Times. We’ll skip a few of the more arcane pieces of knowledge, particularly the math bits. There’ll be no “equations, both the simple and quadratical”; no “binomial theorem...with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.” We’ll also have none of the “integral and differential calculus, or “scientific names of beings animalculous.” Count your blessings.

Let’s turn instead to another section of this military bragadoccio. The MMG goes on to state, “I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's.” We’re most of us quite familiar with the myraid tales, legends, musicals and theories about King Arthur. But who is this Caradoc. He must have been chosen by William S. Gilbert for some other reason than to just rhyme with “paradox.”

Actually, the rhyme proves to be rather apt. For there seem to be more than one Caradoc. Number One is the Welsh saint, who died in the year 1124. Onetime harp-player to King Rhys, prince of South Wales, one of the early Tudor clan, he was dismissed for losing one of the prince’s favorite greyhounds. He went off to serve the Bishop at Llandaff, in today’s Cardiff, where he became a hermit, eventually ending his days on an island off the Pembroke coast. He was never formally canonised, in spite of the intervention of the chronicler Gerald of Wales.

Caradoc Number Two turns up in the royal line of the Kings of Brittany in the fifth century. Number Three is the twelfth-century historian Caradoc of Lancaruan, who wrote a History of Cambria and a Life of Gildas, another British monk-historian. In the latter work Caradoc becomes one of the first writers to introduce Guinevere into the Arthurian legends.

Confusing? But hold. There’s a Number Four. It turns out that the name Caradoc is a Celtic form of the Roman name Caractacus. Caractacus is almost as much of a legend as Arthur. A British chieftan, he fought the Romans around 48 to 51 AD, until being captured, hauled off to Rome and executed.

Those of you who know the Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics well, can see where I’m going with this. For our moder major-general goes on to expound on his familairity with “ev'ry detail of Caractacus's uniform.” Confusing? It was probably meant to be.

1836 - November

Nov 2
The board of Canada's Welland Canal Company resolves to submit petitions to the legislature.

Nov 3
Fur trader Isaac Graham rallies a party of Californians and Mexican renegades to seek independence from Mexico.

Nov 4
The Welland Canal board submits a petition to the legislature.

Nov 6
The first steam train trip in Maine is made, Bangor to Old Town, 12 miles, 37 1/2 cents.

Unitarian clergyman and philosopher Francis Ellingwood Abbot is born in Boston, Massachusetts, to teacher Joseph Hale Abbot and Fanny Ellingwood Larcom Abbot.

Nov 7
California declares independence from Mexico. Mexico does not interfere.

Nov 11
Opposing the formation of a Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, Chile declares war.

Nov 18
Lyricist-poet William Schwenck Gilbert is born in London.

Nov 30
The U. S. and the Peru-Bolivia Confederation sign a treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation, in Lima.

St. Augustine, Florida

© David Minor / Eagles Byte

Passage of Time

In 1900 New York City military surplus dealer Francis Bannerman purchased Pollepel Island in the Hudson River, south of Poughkeepsie. Over the next 17 years he built a castle-like structure as a combination summer home and storage warehouse. After Bannerman’s 1918 death the structure underwent a series of destructive incidents, including an explosion and later a fire, that destroyed the interior. In 1967 the family, who had continued living there during the summers, sold the building to New York State.

Last winter I was returning from Manhattan by train on a wintry day and took these pictures out of the passenger car window, which due to conditions turned out to have an almost abstract look.

















Then, this past December, the New York Times reported that two thirds of the eastern tower and a third of the adjacent wall had crumbled, due to over a century of poor weather.

So, there’ a slightly smaller portion left to see today. Still, worth a look, if you get a chance.

© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte

RECENT NOTE

A Preservation News Story on Banerman's Castle can be found at

www.preservationnation.org/magazine/story-of-the-week/2010/end-of-a-fairy-tale.html

1931 MAY

May Canadian steelworker George MacEachern and his wife have a
child. Work runs out and he’s forced to apply for relief. He gets $3
a week, for groceries only. He will later become chairman of Canada's
Unemployed Workers Association.
Vienna’s Creditanstadt bank fails.

May 1 The Empire State Building opens.
Jazz trumpet and saxophone player Ira Sullivan is born in
Washington, D.C.
May 5 Gangster Francis "Two-Gun" Crowley kills a New York City police
officer.
May 6 Baseball player Willie Mays is born in Westfield, Alabama.
May 7 Crowley is tracked to a West 90th Street building, which is soon
surrounded by 300 policemen. Over 900 shots are exchanged before
a wounded Crowley is captured. He is later executed.
May 9 The journal Nature publishes the Big Bang theory of the creating of
the universe.
May 12 Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye dies in Brussels at the age of 72.
May 14 Broadway theatrical producer David Belasco dies in New York City
at the age of 77.
May 20 Author Anais Ninn joins the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and
Company.
May 23 Black athlete Jesse Owens competes in his first state scholastic meet
at Columbus, Ohio, sets the scholastic broad jump record of 22 feet
3 7.9 inches.
May 28 Canadian archaeologist H. A. Thompson begins a dig in Greece at
the suspected site of the Athens agora.
May 31 Opera singer Shirley Verrett is born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

© 2010 David Minor / Eagles Byte

209. Agoraphilia II - Can You Dig It?

Broadcast February 24, 2001


Prince Charming can sometimes appear from the most unlikely places. Devlin, Ontario, in this case. Homer Armstrong Thompson, who died in May of last year, would discover and awaken the sleeping Agora that had lain for centuries beneath Athenian ground. It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, but archaeologists train themselves to look beyond days, weeks, months, and years.

Today, when magazine covers warn of the perils of human cloning, it’s easy to forget that there are other, subtler, less scientific methods of influencing a new human life. Thompson’s father, a dairy farmer who moved to British Columbia sometime after his son’s birth, had a great love for the Classics. Which explains the choice of the name Homer. Whatever he hoped to gain from the choice, things couldn’t have turned out more to his liking. Homer received his B.A. and M.A. in classics at the University of British Columbia in the mid-twenties and went on for a Ph.D from the University of Michigan, where he learned of a project sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, to excavate the general area of the city’s ancient agora. He applied for and received a fellowship and found his life’s work. And a wife, Dorothy Burr, who would become the first female fellow on the project and partner with Homer through the years.

On May 28, 1931, a field notebook reported, “In the afternoon, H.A. Thompson commenced the supervision of Section A." H.A. Thompson had his work cut out for him. First it was necessary to relocate the people of a whole crowded neighborhood of houses and shops dating back to the previous century and then to raze the buildings and begin carefully digging and sifting through over thirty feet and dozens of centuries of rubble. Their only clues to the precise location of the agora had been written several millennia previously. It wasn’t until 1938, during the excavation of the shop of one Simon the cobbler, that they would uncover a stone with the word ‘agora’ on it and know they were on the right tract. The second such stone would not be found for another 30 years. In the meantime, two wars would interrupt the work. No sooner had World War II ended, than a Greek civil war broke out. Thompson was said to have worked for allied intelligence during both conflicts. One account has him raising a white flag over the agora site and convincing both Greek factions that their common heritage was at stake and that they should go and fight somewhere else.

Gradually the work began to pay off. Artifacts appeared. Such as ballots cast by jurors during a trial, medicine vials of the kind that probably held the hemlock used to kill the condemned, such as Socrates, hobnails used by our friend Simon, pieces of pottery, known as ostracon, used to vote to exile (or ostracize) other felons. A puzzle was uncovered in the form of a building with a foundation newer than the walls. It turned out the Romans had been engaging in some historic re-creation of their own. Thompson helped raise funds from the Rockefellers and others to establish a museum in one of the restored buildings. By the time of his retirement in 1988, he could have the satisfaction of knowing he’d rescued one small, important piece of the past.

208. Agoraphilia I -Let’s Get Together

Broadcast February 17, 2001


In his recent book The Right to Vote, Alexander Keyssar includes a brief summary of the Australian ballot, introduced there in 1856. What made this voting mechanism unique was the fact it was a secret vote. No one but yourself would know who you had voted for, unless you chose to tell them. England adopted the method in 1872; it was introduced into the U. S. in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky, and soon became the standard for the rest of the United States. The idea, of course, was to prevent intimidation and corruption. The origins of the idea however, go back to a time long before the first British convict set foot on the shores of Australia.

Voting day! Our chance to make our voices heard. There are no chads or punch holes. We are handed two ballots, shaped like a child’s top. Each has a shaft protruding from it. One shaft is hollow; the other is solid. Each one has it’s own assigned meaning. Yes or No. Candidate A or Candidate B. Life or Death. We step up to a container and drop one of the ballots in, holding it by the shaft so no one can see whether it’s solid or hollow. We are in the agora, or gathering place, in Athens. It’s the 4th century B. C. Democracy is taking its first toddling steps - and we are there.

If we stand at the Alter of the Twelve Gods, at the exact center of the agora, and face to the southeast, we see the Acropolis towering overhead. A straight race track stretches off to our right. Low single-story buildings surround the perimeter of the area, the civic center of the city - law courts, a mint, assembly halls for the executive committee and for the senate, a military headquarters. There are taverns and shops, one of the latter belonging to - I’m not making this up - Simon the Cobbler. After you’ve voted and then picked up your mended sandals from Simon, the rest of the day stretches out before you like that nearby racetrack, long and sun-baked. If you’re feeling lucky and there’s a race on, you can watch as the chariots roar past and their riders jump on and off while wearing full body armor. A religious procession might be passing through, headed for the temples up near the Parthenon. Perhaps you’d just lie to sit in front of the tavern, a half-drained wine cup in your hand. Or saunter over to the public notice board and get all the latest news. This is the place to meet and greet, wine and dine, see and be seen, a Classical chat room. And there’s often more than just idle gossip, especially when that gadfly Socrates is around, which is most of the time. He practically lives here. And one day he will die here, when the ballot shafts are against him.

And the time will come when the agora itself will die. Athens will grow, her center will shift, waves of conquerors will sweep over her. Plundering men and nations such as Sparta, Alexander the Great, Rome, and Lord Elgin, will change her face. The public buildings will crumble and one day the agora will become a trash-strewn field of rubble. It will heap up, layer upon layer, until Greece forgets just exactly where it was. Tenement houses will be built on the site and fill with swarms of the city’s poor. No more races will be run here, no philosophers will stroll the pathways, no more votes will be cast. The agora sleeps, buried beneath centuries of history. It will be a long, long sleep. But not an endless one.