Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the king of Macedonia that conquered the Persian empire and annexed it to Macedonia, is considered one of the greatest military geniuses of all times. He is the first king to be called “the Great.”

Alexander is one of the most fascinating personalities in human history. Although he was the son of a king and inherited an empire that included most of the Greek city-states, Alexander’s own conquests are what have made him admired, vilified, emulated, and studied for over two millennia.

Alexander, born in Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia, was the son of Philip II, king of Macedonia, and of Olympia, a princess of Epirus. Philip and Olympia wanted nothing less than the best for their son, so when he was 13, his parents hired Aristotle to be his personal tutor. Alexander was trained together with other children of the nobility at Aristotles Nyphaeon.

It is here that Alexander met Hephastion, his future best friend and alter ego. Aristotle gave Alexander a thorough training in rhetoric and literature and stimulated his interest in science, medicine, and philosophy, all of which became of the utmost importance for Alexander in his later life. The two later became estranged, due to their difference of opinion on the status of foreigners; Aristotle saw them as barbarians, while Alexander sought to unite Macedonians and foreigners.

In 340 BC, when Philip went to Byzantium to fight rebels, Alexander, a mere 16 years old, was left in charge of Macedonia as regent, with the power to rule in Philip’s name in his absence. That Alexander was given such a position at such a young age indicates that he was already accomplished in battle. But Alexander never got along well with his father, although Philip was proud of Alexander for the Bucephalus incident. Alexander had always been closer to Olympia than to Philip. Philip and Olympia also did not get along all that well, owing primarily to Olympia’s non-Macedonian heritage.

The family essentially was split apart irreparably when Philip married a woman named Cleopatra, a Macedonian. At the wedding banquet, Cleopatra’s father made a remark about Philip fathering a “legitimate” heir, i.e., one that was pure Macedonian. Alexander took exception and threw his cup at the man, and some sources say Alexander killed him.

When Alexander was 18, Philip left him in command of the left wing of the Macedonian army at the battle of Chaeronea. The battle was won, thanks in part to a courageous cavalry charge led by Alexander himself. When Alexander was 20, Philip was assassinated. A guard plunged a spear into his chest. Some say it was a conspiracy orchestrated by Olympias. And so, Alexander inherited a kingdom.

Inheriting a kingdom from his father didn’t really please Alexander. What kind of hero gets everything given to him? This wouldn’t satisfy Achilles or Hercules and it wouldn’t satisfy him.

He got his first opportunity almost immediately. Some of the Greek city-states saw the ascension of the 20-year-old Alexander as a chance to regain their independence from the foreign Macedonians. By the way, “foreign” is how the Greeks saw the Macedonians, not how the Macedonians saw themselves. To this day, there’s still contention over whether Macedonians are Greeks.

Alexander took care of the little rebellion post-haste. To set an example, he completely razed the Greek city of Thebes in 335 B.C., killing most of the population — including women and children — and enslaving those few left alive. After that the Greeks were happily united behind Alexander and he could focus his attention on expanding the empire.

He immediately began pushing east, against the old enemy Persia — which his father never succeeded in defeating.

After winning a battle for the city of Gordium, Alexander is said to have solved the famously tricky Gordian Knot. He sliced through the thing with his sword rather than fool around it. A legend supposedly foretold that whoever solved this puzzle would rule all of Asia.

Alexander rapidly moved on to destroy the city of Tyre … push through Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan … and conquer Egypt (or, depending on your perspective, “liberate” Egypt from the Persians). In bloody battle after bloody battle the Persian Empire and most of the known world fell to the hero Alexander and his Macedonian war machine.

For his greater glory, Alexander founded some 70 cities in the lands he conquered and ordered them named after himself. Most famous, of course, is Alexandria in Egypt. In India, when his beloved horse died, he ordered a city to be built named Bucephala.

In 11 years, from 335 B.C. to 324 B.C., Alexander and his army battled their way across 22,000 miles.

For perspective on that distance, think about traveling across America eight times, say, from Alexandria, Virginia to Alexander Beach, Washington. (Although Alexander did not conquer North America it’s interesting to note that there are nearly two dozen cities and towns here named Alexander or Alexandria.)

For most of Alexander’s army these miles were traveled on foot. There’s speculation that some of the grueling miles weren’t even necessary, except to confirm Alexander’s status as a hero.

In 324 B.C., Alexander decided to march his army through the barren wasteland of the Gedrosian desert in present-day Iran. Some say he could have made this trip easy by sailing his troops through the Persian Gulf instead, but he decided to go through the desert as a challenge — because no one had ever successfully brought an army through it.

Although the number is probably widely exaggerated, the Roman historian Arrian claimed that three quarters of Alexander’s men died during this misadventure in the desert.

We will probably never know the truth, of Alexander’s mysterious death, even though new theories are still coming out. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king and the great conqueror, died at the age of 33, on June 10, 323 BC. Three days earlier, on the 7th of June, 323 BC, the Macedonians were allowed to file past their leader for the last time before he finally succumbed to the illness. Alexander died without designating a successor.

The Macedonian empire didn’t live much longer than Alexander. After his death his kingdom was promptly carved up into three pieces by his generals.

And the Macedonian people have never seen much peace or freedom. They’ve been under the feet of ambitious conquerors from the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Turkish Empire. More recently, their country was carved up between the world wars and made a part of communist Yugoslavia.

But Alexander did win his glory. He fulfilled his ambition.

According to Egyptian legend, the first kings of Egypt were to become some of country’s most famous gods. We really do not know whether these individuals actually existed in human form or what regions of Egypt they may have ruled over.

Only at the end of the Predynastic period, prior to the unification of Egypt, can we recognise specific kings who most likely ruled over either Lower or Upper Egypt.

The Pharaoh’s responsibilities as the political ruler of Egypt can be compared to almost any monarch around this time. The Pharaoh’s duties ranged from commanding the army, to settling legal disputes.

Origins of the word Pharaoh are from the term “per-aa” that means “great house” and developed via the Greek, into the word we now use today. “Per-aa” was originally used to describe the royal court or the state itself, in the sense that the “great house” was the entity responsible for the taxation of the lesser houses (”perw”), which were the temple lands and private estates. From the late 18th Dynasty and onwards, “per-aa” had begun to be used to refer to the actual king himself.

According to many sources, the first real king of a unified Egypt was Menes. He would have ruled around 3100 BC, but there is little if any archaeological basis for this name. Most scholars today believe that he may have been a king named Narmer, or more likely still, Aha, two figures that are better attested in the archaeological record.

The king was generally considered to be an incarnation of the falcon god Horus and the posthumous son of his father Osiris - the divine king slain by his brother, Seth. Horus fought his uncle Seth for the return of the throne, and this process would be symbolically demonstrated in the “accession process” - the proper burial of the new pharaoh’s predecessor. The new pharaoh would take the role of Horus, carrying out the last rites of the deceased Osiris.

Ideally the kingship was passed down from father to son, and each king was usually keen to demonstrate to his subjects that he was the “chosen” heir whose right to rule was ensured by his own divinity. Reliefs in temples, tombs and palaces stress the King’s divine birth and his function as a representative of the gods was to preserve and restore the original harmony of the universe, imposing order and preventing chaos.

There were a number of instances where the heir’s coronation as a co-regent took place prior to the current pharaoh’s death. This has led to much confusion amongst scholars, as in some instances, the co-regent’s regnal years were counted only after the death of his father, whilst in other circumstances they were included from the moment of the coronation.

Many of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs have now achieved “household name” status, such as Tutankhamun the “boy King”, Hatshepsut the “female pharaoh”, Akhenaten the “heretic” king, Ramesses II “the great”, Queen Cleopatra VII who’s affair with Mark Anthony and the fall of Egypt to the Roman Empire.

Other famous Ancient Egyptians include Nefertiti, the beautiful wife of Akhenaten and mother to his six daughters. She is often portrayed wearing a unique style of crown, and officiating in religious ceremonies alongside the king. In one instance she is even shown smiting a foreigner, a traditional pose of the pharaoh.

Wal-Mart, the formerly invincible, went bankrupt, belly-up, pleite (as we say in German). Many reasons were given: the loyalty to “corporate identity” demanded of workers, a concept strange to some Germans; the fact that the Wal-Mart director for Germany didn’t even speak German; the fact that in our so-PC times the store forbad “flirting” among workers, a prohibition many Europeans think is merely puritanical and dumb; the fact that workers were required to smile at and greet shoppers (Germans think something is brewing if people are too friendly); and the fact that Wal-Mart’s big-box stores are simply too unlike the little mom-and-pop stores, called “Aunt Emma Shops” in Germany, that have defined retailing there for generations. Some economic commentators mentioned President Bush’s unloved Iraq War, and even more general anti-American sentiments in the German populace.

Whatever the reasons, the result was huge losses for Wal-Mart, and ultimately a pullout. Of course, we say. If they don’t like you in retailing, you simply pack up and leave, if you have a place to leave to. You don’t stay around and rail at those stupid customers for not loving you more. You, the retailer, have proposed; the customer has disposed. And that’s all there is to it. If people don’t want what you’re selling, you can’t sell it, because they won’t buy it. They don’t even have to give a justification for not buying it.

Just now, as every opinion poll shows, the US’s public standing in the rest of the world has fallen to new lows. We can certainly debate why that is so, but it’s clear that the (wo)man on the street outside the U.S. is simply not buying what the crowd in Washington is selling. And it doesn’t do a bit of good for the inside-the-Beltway folks to excoriate all the foreign customers streaming out the door.

They’ve voted with their feet: it’s up to the US to do something about it if we want a presence there at all. Since “there” is anywhere else in the world but here, it would behoove us to figure out what went wrong and rectify it — not turn the air blue about how dumb those damn furriners are to doubt us.

The Wal-Mart rule tells us people don’t even have to have a good reason for disliking what America does. If they do, they do, and it’s up to us to do something about that. The customer is king, even if what we’re selling is a view of ourselves.

America’s standing in the world is currently low indeed-justly or unjustly. (For the record: I think it’s unjust, but I understand why it’s so.) A friend of mine, a Berliner with longtime U.S. ties, teaches English and American culture at a school in Berlin. She tells me that her efforts to make the point that the U.S. is a positive force in world affairs are now in vain. No one will listen to her. The students roll their eyes and disagree when she speaks of “American democracy,” which they now hold to be an oxymoron.

Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century.

Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figuera in Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age and Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old. His art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School. In 1923 his father bought his son his first printing press.

Salvador Dali apparently led a perfectly normal childhood, albeit the perfectly normal childhood of a artistic prodigy. In other words, he was spoiled and tempermental, but not obviously the raving loon that would emerge in his later life.

Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.

In 1928 Dali went to Paris where he met the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. He established himself as the principal figure of a group of surrealist artists grouped around Andre Breton, who was something like the theoretical “schoolmaster” of surrealism.

It was an exciting time to be an artist, as painters like Pablo Picasso were tearing down the old conventions of realism in favor of time-bending Cubism and the young movement of Surrealism.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recurring images of burning giraffes and melting watches became the artist’s surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to execute his paintings in a nearly photorealistic style. No wonder that the artist was a great admirer of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.

In Paris, Dali met the love of his life, more or less - a woman named Gala. She was a Russian immigrant and ten years older than Dali. When he met her, she was married to Paul Eluard. After extracting her from her previous relationship, Dali took her to his heart and put her in charge of his business operations. Like Andrew Wyeth painting his neighbor Helga, Dali painted Gala dozens on dozens of times. Unlike Wyeth, Dali spiced up his variations on a theme with various mythical figures, orbiting spheres, Abraham Lincoln, and various adult situations.
Gala decided to stay with Dali. She became his companion, his muse, his sexual partner, his model in numerous art works and his business manager. For him she was everything. Most of all Gala was a stabilizing factor in his life. And she managed his success in the 1930s with exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

Gala was legally divorced from her husband in 1932. In 1934 Dali and Gala were married in a civil ceremony in Paris and in 1958 in church after Gala’s former husband had died in 1952. However from around 1965 on, the couple was seen less frequently together. But Gala continued to manage Dali’s business affairs.

In 1933 Salvador Dali had his first one-man show in New York. One year later he visited the U.S. for the first time supported by a loan of US$500 from Pablo Picasso. To evade World War II, Dali chose the U.S.A. as his permanent residence in 1940. He had a series of spectacular exhibitions, among others a great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Besides creating a number of great paintings, Dali caused the attention of the media by playing the role of a surrealist clown. He made a lot of money and was contemptuously nicknamed Avida Dollars (greedy for dollars) by Andre Breton.

Dali became the darling of the American High Society. Celebrities like Jack Warner or Helena Rubinstein gave him commissions for portraits. His art works became a popular trademark and besides painting he pursued other activities - jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel or film making with Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock made the classic thriller Spellbound, for which Dali designed a series of hallucinatory dream sequences that allow the protagonists to unlock the movie’s secrets through psychoanalysis. Dali had wanted to cover Ingrid Bergman in ants for one of the scenes. It’s not entirely clear whether that was motivated by art or simply for perverted kicks. Either way, Bergman declined. Less memorably, Dali contributed a dream sequence to the 1950 romantic comedy “Father of the Bride.”

In 1948 Dali and Gala returned to Europe, spending most of their time either in their residence in Lligat/Spain or in Paris/France or in New York. Dali developed a lively interest in science, religion and history. He integrated things into his art that he had picked up from popular science magazines. Another source of inspiration were the great classical masters of painting like Raphael, Velasquez or the French painter Ingres. The artist commented his shift in style with the words: “To be a surrealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses.”

In 1958 the artist began his series of large sized history paintings. He painted one monumental painting every year during the summer months in Lligat. The artist’s late art works combine more than ever his perfect and meticulous painting technique with his fantastic and limitless imaginations.

In 1980 Dali was forced to retire due to palsy, a motor disorder, that caused a permanent trembling and weakness of his hands. He was not able to hold a brush any more. The fact that he could not follow his vocation and passion of painting and the news of Gala’s death in 1982 left him with deep depressions.

After Gala’s death he moved to Pubol, a castle, he had bought and decorated for Gala. In 1984, when he was lying in bed, a fire broke out and he suffered sever burns. Two years later, a pacemaker had to be implanted.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on the 15th of April 1452. Leonardo was born probably in this farmhouse in Anchiano, which is 3 km away from Vinci. The family of Leonardo lived in this area since the 13th century.

In the same year when Leonardo was born Ser Piero married his first wife. He didn’t marry the mother of Leonardo, because probably she was a daughter of a farmer. The mother of Leonardo was called Catarina.

The father of Leonardo da Vinci, Ser Piero, was 25 years old and a public notary when Leonardo was born in 1452. In the same year Ser Piero married his first wife Albiera. He didn’t marry the mother of Leonardo, because she was the daughter of a farmer and not from a wealthy family. The mother of Leonardo was called Catarina. Her first name is all what we know today.
Ser Piero and his first wife didn’t have children. Maybe this is the reason why Leonardo was integrated in the family of his father.

In Vinci Leonardo went to school. Vasari told that teachers of Leonardo da Vinci were despaired about all the questions and doubts of Leonardo. Leonardo learned at school to write, to read and to calculate. Also he was taught in geometry and Latin. Later Leonardo tried to improve his knowledge in Latin, because he thought that he didn’t learn enough at school in Latin. Perhaps this is the reason why Leonardo did his notes in Italian.
Leonardo lived in Vinci until 1466. With the age of 14 Leonardo moved to Florence where he began an apprenticeship in the workshop of Verrocchio.

Leonardo started an apprenticeship in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio 1466. Verrocchio was at this time the most gifted and manifoldest artist in Florence. He was a sculptor, painter, goldsmith, bronze caster and more. There is no doubt that Verrocchio had much influence on Leonardo. Verrocchio was fascinated by the drawings of the young Leonardo and so he gave him a place in his workshop. Leonardo worked at the workshop of Verrocchio with some other famous artists like Botticelli, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi.

Leonardo started his apprenticeship with the mixing of colors and then he painted simple parts of paintings. There are no works of Leonardo known between 1466 and 1472, but Leonardo taught himself to paint in oils at this time.

In June 1472 Leonardo was listed in the red book of painters from Florence (Campagnia de Pittori). With the membership in the painters guild of Florence ended the apprenticeship of Leonardo. The picture shows a cut of this book where Leonardo is listed with his native name Lionardo. Leonardo didn’t leave the workshop of Verrocchio at the end of his apprenticeship.

The first known and dated work of Leonardo da Vinci is a pen and ink drawing of a valley shaped by the river Arno. This drawing dated 5th of August 1473 reflects the ingenious mind of Leonardo. The Arno valley is drawn with aerial perspective by allowing the color of the paper to dominate and less details as the depth increases. This effect will be called later “the perspective of disappearance”.

1472-1475 Leonardo da Vinci assisted his master Andrea del Verrocchio on the painting “Baptism of Christ”, which was commissioned by the monks of San Salvi near Florence. The angel kneeling at the far left, parts of the landscape and the body of Christ are considered to be from Leonardo.

It is supposed that Leonardo had his own workshop between 1476 and 1478. During this time he received at least two orders. The sketch from 1478 shows an angel simlar to the one of the painting “Baptism of Christ”. In addition some mechanical elements and a portrait are part of this sketch. It’s remarkable that t this time Leonardo da Vinci already started his mechanical studies.

A remarkable event happened on 8. April 1476. At this time it was usual to put anonymous accusations in a wooden box (called tamburo), which was put up in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (Picture).

On 8. April Leonardo and four others were accused. The anonymous person accused Leonardo to have a homosexual affair with Jacopo Saltarelli, who was a model. The procedure ended for all participants with an acquittal of the charge.
This story is an indication of the supposed homosexuality of Leonardo da Vinci.

King Francis I. invited Leonardo da Vinci to spend the last span of life in Amboise at the court of France. In autumn 1516 Leonardo arrived in Amboise. In his baggage was the famous painting Mona Lisa.

Leonardo da Vinci invited by King Francis I. to Amboise, France in the year 1516 to spend the last span of life. In his baggage was the famous painting Mona Lisa. Leonardo lived in Amboise in the small castle Cloux which is now called Le Clos Luce.
In France Leonardo didn’t paint, but he made hydrological studies.

Leonardo died on 2 May 1519 in Amboise. At this time Leonardo da Vinci was 67 year old. His state of health was not the best, because Leonardo had a paralysis on the right side of his body since 1517 and Vasari told about an illness some weeks before Leonardo died.
On 23 April 1519 Leonardo wrote his last will.

“I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb,” Melville wrote to Hawthorne. The work was only recognized as a masterpiece 30 years after Melville’s death. TYPEE (1846), a fictionalized travel narrative, was the author’s most popular book during his lifetime.

Herman Melville was born in New York City into an established merchant family. One of his grandfather’s had taken part in the Boston Tea Party dressed in Indian garb. Herman was the third child of eight.

His father, Allan Melvill, an importer of French dry goods, went bankrupt and died when Melville was 12. Maria Gansevoort Melvill was left alone to raise the children; at that time the family lived in Albany. Occasionally she received help from her wealthy relatives. Through his mother’s influence, biblical stories became a part of Melville’s imagination from his early childhood.

A bout of scarlet fever in 1826 left Melville with permanently weakened eyesight. He attended Albany (N.Y.) Classical School in 1835. After leaving the school he was largely autodidact, devouring Shakespeare as well as historical, anthropological, and technical works. From the age of 12, he worked as a clerk, teacher, and farmhand.

In 1847 Melville married Elisabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts. After three years in New York, he bought a farm, “Arrowhead”, near Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and became friends with him for some time. Melville had almost completed Moby-Dick when Hawthorne encouraged him to change it from a story full of details about whaling, into an allegorical novel.

Inspired by the achievement of Hawthore, Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. He worked at his desk all day not eating anything till 4 or 5 o’clock, and bursting with energy he shouted: “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” When the novel was published, it did not bring him the fame he had acquired in the 1840s. Readers of Typhee and Omoo were not expecting this kind of story, and its brilliance was only noted by some critics. Through the story Melville meditated questions about faith and the workings of God’s intelligence. He returned to these meditations in his last great work, BILLY BUDD, a story left unfinished at his death. Its manuscript was found in Melville’s desk when he died.

“Call me Ishmael,” says the narrator in the beginning of Moby-Dick. We don’t know is it his real name and exactly when the story is taking place. He signs abroad the whaler Pequod with his friend Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Sea Islands. Then the mood of the story changes. The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic discourses, philosophical speculations, and Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging. Mysterious Captain Ahab, a combination of Macbeth, Job, and Milton’s Satan, appears after several days at sea. Melville named the character after the Israelite king who worshiped the pagan sun god Baal. Ahab reveals to the crew that the purpose of the voyage is to hunt and kill the snow-white sperm whale, known as Moby-Dick, that had cost Ahab his leg on a previous voyage. The captain has his own faith and sees the cosmos in contention between two rival deities. “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” Ahab has nailed a goldpiece to the mast and offers it as a reward to the first man who sights the creature. Starbuck, the first mate, tries to dissuade Ahab from the quest. The novel culminates when Moby-Dick charges the boat which sinks. Ahab is drowned, tied by the harpoon line his archenemy. In his end Ahab takes his crew with him. The only survivor is the narrator, who is rescued by a passing ship.

Melville’s masterwork was largely misunderstood and it sold only some 3,000 copies during Melville’s lifetime. Moby-Dick can be read as a thrilling sea story, an examination of the conflict between man and nature - the battle between Ahab and the whale is open to many interpretations. It is a pioneer novel but the prairie is now sea, or an allegory on the Gold Rush, but now the gold is a whale. Jorge Luis Borges has seen in the universe of Moby-Dick “a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.” (from The Total Library, 1999) Clare Spark has connected in Hunting Captain Ahab (2001) different interpretations with changing political atmosphere - depending on the point of view, Ahab has been regarded as a Promethean hero or a forefather of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. The director John Huston questions in his film version (1956) which one, Ahab or the whale, is the real Monster. Ray Bradbury, with whom Huston wrote the screenplay, had to struggle with the Screen Writers’ Guild over his credits. In Bradbury’s version, the whale is destructed.

Melville’s later works include BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR (1865), privately printed JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS (1888), and TIMOLEON (1891). Melville’s death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. His unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, remained unpublished until 1924. A definitive edition appeared in 1962. This story, which Freud would have loved, is set in 1797 during the war between England and France. Billy Budd, ‘the Handsome Sailor’, is favorite of the crew of HMS Bellipotent. He becomes the target of John Claggart, the satanic master-at-arms, whose character bears similarities to Ahab. Claggart accuses falsely Billy of being involved in a supposed mutiny. The innocent Billy, who is unable to answer the charge because of a chronic stammer, accidentally kills Claggart. Captain Vere sees through Claggart’s plot, fears reaction among the crew, if Billy is not punished. He calls a court and in effect instructs it to find Billy guilty of capital crime. The court condemns Billy, who goes willingly to his fate and is hanged from the yardarm after crying out ‘God bless Captain Vere’. Later Vere is killed during an engagement with the French, murmuring as his last words Billy’s name.

The restaurant industry and its analysts have long pondered the enigmatic question of why restaurants fail. Restaurant failures have been attributed to economic and social factors, to competition and legal restrictions, and even to government intervention.

In the current complex environment of the restaurant business, we believe that it is imperative that prospective and current owners understand why restaurants fail.

Restaurant failures can be studied from economic, marketing, and managerial perspectives. Of these three perspectives, we observe that restaurant failures have been studied primarily from the economic perspective.

Economic perspective

This category includes restaurants that failed for economic reasons such as decreased profits from diminished revenues; depressed profits resulting from poor controls; and voluntary and involuntary bankruptcies, involving foreclosures, takeover by creditors, receiverships, or frozen assets for nonpayment of receipts.

Marketing perspective

This category consists of restaurants that cease to operate at a specified location for marketing reasons, such as a deliberate strategic choice of repositioning, adapting to changing demographics, accommodating the unrealized demand for new services and products, market consolidation to gain market share in selected regions, and realignment of the product portfolio that requires selected unit closures.
Managerial perspective

This category consists of restaurant failures that are the result of managerial limitations and incompetence. Examples of this group include loss of motivation by owners; management or owner burnout as a result of stress arising from operational problems; issues and concerns of human resources; changes in the personal life of the manager or owner; changes in the stages of the manager or owner’s personal life cycle; and legal, technological, and environmental changes that demand operational modifications.

The gladiatorial fights originated in central Italy, probably as a funeral sacrifice. The first gladiatorial games in Rome were held in 264 BC, when three pairs of gladiators fought as part of a funeral celebration. By 174 BC, 37 pairs participated at a 3-day event.

The Roman Senate limited the number of contestants after Julius Caesar held an event with 300 pairs of gladiators. The emperor Domitian in AD 90 presented combats between women and dwarfs.
The emperor Trajan held the largest contest of gladiators in the year 107 AD to celebrate a victorious battle. This fight included 5000 pairs of fighters.

The gladiators were male slaves, condemned criminals, prisoners of war, and sometimes Christians. They were forced to become swordsmen in training schools called ludi, and special measures were taken to discipline them and prevent them from committing suicide.

Some of the latter became involved because they had financial difficulties, and these events offered generous prize money for the winners. Other volunteers were motivated by the physical challenge and appeal of danger or the prospect of becoming popular idols and sex symbols who could have their pick of pretty young women. Among the graffiti slogans still scrawled on walls at Pompeii, the famous Roman town preserved under a layer of volcanic ash, are: “Caladus, the Thracian, makes all the girls sigh,” and “Crescens, the net fighter, holds the hearts of all the girls.”

The terms “Thracian” and “net fighter” referred to the customary division of gladiators into various types and categories. Among the four main types that had evolved by the early Empire was the heavily armed SamniteSamnite, later called a hoplomachus or secutor. (The Romans may have recognized these three as separate and distinct types, but any such distinctions are now unclear; all employed basically the same weapons and tactics.) A Samnite carried a sword or a lance, a scutum (the rectangular shield used by Roman legionary soldiers),a metal helmet, and protective armor on his right arm and left leg. Another type, the Thracian (so named because he resembled fighters from Thrace, a region of northern Greece), was not as elaborately armed. He wielded a curved short sword, the sica, and a small round shield, the parma.

retiariusA third kind of gladiator, the murmillo, or “fishman” (after the fish-shaped crest on his helmet), was apparently similar to a Samnite but less heavily armed. A murmillo customarily fought still another kind of warrior, the retiarius, or “net-man,” who wore no armor at all. A retiarius attempted to ensnare his opponent in his net (or used the net to trip the other man) and then to stab him with a long, razor-sharp trident, or three-pronged spear.

In addition to the pairings of these main gladiator types, there were a number of special and off-beat types and pairings. These included equites, who fought on horseback using lances, swords, and/or lassoes; the essedarii, who confronted each other on chariots; and, perhaps the most bizarre of the lot, the andabatae, who grappled while blindfolded by massive helmets with no eyeholes. Women gladiators came into vogue under the emperors Nero and Domitian in thee late first century A.D. Evidence shows that Domitian sometimes pitted female fighters against male dwarves as well as against one another.

There is no record of his birth, but his baptism was recorded by the church, thus his birthday is assumed to be the 23 of April. His father was a prominent and prosperous alderman in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and was later granted a coat of arms by the College of Heralds. All that is known of Shakespeare’s youth is that he presumably attended the Stratford Grammar School, and did not proceed to Oxford or Cambridge. The next record we have of him is his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582. The next year she bore a daughter for him, Susanna, followed by the twins Judith and Hamnet two years later.

Seven years later Shakespeare is recognized as an actor, poet and playwright, when a rival playwright, Robert Greene, refers to him as “an upstart crow” in A Groatsworth of Wit. A few years later he joined up with one of the most successful acting troupe’s in London: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. When, in 1599, the troupe lost the lease of the theatre where they performed, (appropriately called The Theatre) they were wealthy enough to build their own theatre across the Thames, south of London, which they called “The Globe.”

The new theatre opened in July of 1599, built from the timbers of The Theatre, with the motto “Totus mundus agit histrionem” (A whole world of players) When James I came to the throne (1603) the troupe was designated by the new king as the King’s Men (or King’s Company). The Letters Patent of the company specifically charged Shakespeare and eight others “freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Inerludes, Morals, Pastorals, stage plays … as well for recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure.”

Shakespeare entertained the king and the people for another ten years until June 19, 1613, when a canon fired from the roof of the theatre for a gala performance of Henry VIII set fire to the thatch roof and burned the theatre to the ground. The audience ignored the smoke from the roof at first, being to absorbed in the play, until the flames caught the walls and the fabric of the curtains.

Amazingly there were no casualties, and the next spring the company had the theatre “new builded in a far fairer manner than before.” Although Shakespeare invested in the rebuilding, he retired from the stage to the Great House of New Place in Statford that he had purchased in 1597, and some considerable land holdings ,where he continued to write until his death in 1616 on the day of his 52nd birthday.

Much of the shape of modern Europe was determined by changes which took place in the time of Gregory VII, who as ‘Hildebrand’ was a powerful influence in the papacy from 1046 and was himself pope from 1073 to his death 1085.

Because Gregory and his ideas played an important role in many of the changes, a knowledge of his pontificate is essential for understanding later European history, up to and including the present.

Gregory has not lacked historians, from his own time onwards. Among the pregnant changes of his time was a shift from speech towards writing as the principal means of government communication and record. Mainly as a result, Gregory’s pontificate was covered by a burst of contemporary documentation. He left a Register (office copies of his outgoing official correspondence in the form of 360 letters), which stands in the Vatican Archive as Registrum Vaticanum 2, - R.V. 1 being the register of John VIII (872-82) two centuries before. Since Gregory VII’s policies also sparked off widespread disputes conducted, to a degree none had been since the fourth century, by written appeals to literate opinion, we also possess thr ee printed volumes of polemical pamphlets (or libelli), while ordinary historiography was also on the increase in his time, given extra stimulus by his ideas the reactions to them; so there was also a new spate of chronicles.

Aficionados will therefore find points to pick at if they want. Prudent ones, however, will not want to; because they will see that they might, by doing so, risk walking past the value of the book as a whole. It is, in fact, a pe arl of great price. What the reader gets for his modicum of industry is a picture of finer resolution than any other available, or indeed that could be available without Cowdrey’s patient method and acquaintance with secondary scholarship. The outcome i s like a magnified scientific photograph, which reveals at a glance the lineaments of an otherwise mysterious and invisible natural process.

Summary cannot do justice to that picture, but can sketch its outline. Gregory must have had a coherent philosophy, we imagine, otherwise he could not have shaken the world. Cowdrey’s shows this to be wrong, and proves, rather, Greg ory’s remarkable degree of flexibility, at times even uncertainty. We may protest, what about the lofty certainties of the so-called Dictatus papae (a series of 27 propositions, exalting papal authority, found in Gregory’s Register between two lett ers dated in March 1075)? Cowdrey shows they were of little or no account. Whatever the origin of the list, Gregory subsequently ignored it, and it can represent no more than a record of one stage in Gregory’s private thinking as his crisis developed. Again, we may ask, what about the Donation of Constantine (an eight-century forgery purporting to convey from that Emperor to the bishop of Rome ex officio, imperial authority over Rome and other ill-defined ‘parts of the West’)? Gregory ignored that too. At least, he never quoted it or referred to it, and built up his claims on other grounds. Even Gregory’s often-mentioned claims to hold suzerainty of certain kingdoms by ‘feudal’ right are revealed, through a careful array of all related utt erances, as too awash with inconsistencies to qualify as coherent political legal doctrine.

All Gregory demanded of his kings was that they stand up for justitia, which included church autonomy. Because Henry IV had failed on this point, yet remained prima facie the most powerful European monarch, Gregory had to outmanoeuvre him and hence adjust the outlying parts of his own ideology, including a departure, in this one case of Germany, from his usual support for the hereditary principle. Surely without foreseeing the lasting results of what he did, Gregory encour aged the opposite, elective principle in the German royal constitution. Granted the centrifugal forces already present in Germany - between Saxony and the Rhineland, North and South - this intervention tilted the German constitution decisively in a feder al direction.

Gregory died in ‘exile’, in Salerno (Cowdrey argues he was not, as usually supposed, bitter about it, on the ground that it was a kind of blessed martyrdom), while Henry campaigned on, his antipope Clement installed in Rome. Despite the papalists’ increasing use of the expression regnum Teutonicorum, the Henrician idea of Empire was far from dead; and when it did finally die, in the reign of Henry’s great-great-grandson Frederick II, that would be after a struggle which hurt the papacy almost as much. So Gregory does not look like the winner. In two important respects it was nevertheless Gregory’s vision which found vindication by subsequent history. He had forcefully differentiated ecclesiastical from secular power. On one hand that meant that canon lawyers, though they rarely quoted Gregory as an authority (as Cowdrey points out) could in the twelfth century crowd into the curia to build on his bequest, armed after 1130 with an increasingly universal corpus of law, in Gratian’ s Decretum, which made the pope rather than any rex Teutonicorum the successor of to the classical Roman Emperor, as supreme appellate authority. Meanwhile, by denying this role to the secular Emperor the post-Gregorian papacy directed west ern Christendom towards Gregory’s, not Henry’s, ideal political structure: not, that is, as in the in so many other parts of world, the unified structure of single Empire with direct divine authority, but the fragmented one of states politically independe nt of each other, while sharing the core of a common religion.