<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/12/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Yoshie Furuhashi</b> <<a href="mailto:critical.montages@gmail.com">critical.montages@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 10/12/06, Jerry Monaco <<a href="mailto:monacojerry@gmail.com">monacojerry@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> Oh, the abuses of art....<br>><br>> 'Three and a half centuries after Euripides' death the Roman<br>> multimillionaire Crassus led a Roman army into Syria, was defeated by the
<br>> Parthians, and killed. When the messenger arrived at the Parthian capital<br>> with his head, the court was watching a Greek company perform<br>> the Bacchae.<br>> They had reached the scene in which Pentheus' mother Agave, still in
<br>> Dionysiac frenzy, comes on stage carrying her son's severed head.<br>> The head<br>> of Crassus was thrown on the floor; Jason, the actor playing Agave,<br>> substituted it for the prop he had been carrying and resumed the
<br>> performance, singing the famous aria "I bring from the mountain, this bough<br>> fresh-cut…." The audience went wild.'<br>><br>> Bernard Knox<br><br>Uncanny.<br><br>The Bush administration has behaved in Iraq just as Crassus behaved
<br>during his expedition to the same region.<br><br><blockquote>On his arrival, things went at first as he [Crassus] had<br>hoped, for he easily bridged the Euphrates and led his army across in<br>safety, and took possession of many cities in Mesopotamia which came
<br>over to him of their own accord. But at one of them, of which<br>Apollonius was tyrant, a hundred of his soldiers were slain, whereupon<br>he led up his forces against it, mastered it, plundered its property,<br>and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The city was called Zenodotia
<br>by the Greeks. For its capture he allowed his soldiers to salute him<br>as Imperator, thereby incurring much disgrace and showing himself of a<br>paltry spirit and without good hope for the greater struggles that lay<br>
before him, since he was so delighted with a trifling acquisition.<br>After furnishing the cities which had come over to his side with<br>garrisons, which amounted in all to seven thousand men-at-arms and a<br>thousand horsemen, he himself withdrew to take up winter quarters in
<br>Syria, and to await there his son, who was coming from Caesar in Gaul,<br>decorated with the insignia of his deeds of valour, and leading a<br>thousand picked horsemen.<br><br>This was thought to be the first blunder which Crassus committed, --
<br>after the expedition itself, which was the greatest of all his<br>blunders, -- because, when he should have advanced and come into touch<br>with Babylon and Seleucia, cities always hostile to the Parthians, he<br>gave his enemies time for preparation. Then, again, fault was found
<br>with him because his sojourn in Syria was devoted to mercenary rather<br>than to military purposes. For he made no estimate of the number of<br>his troops, and instituted no athletic contests for them, but reckoned<br>
up the revenues of cities, and spent many days weighing exactly the<br>treasures of the goddess in Hierapolis, and prescribed quotas of<br>soldiers for districts and dynasts to furnish, only to remit the<br>prescription when money was offered him, thereby losing their respect
<br>and winning their contempt. (Plutarch, "The Life of Crassus,"<br><<a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html">http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html
</a>>)</blockquote><br><br></blockquote></div><br>I agree with you completely here. But I guess I was thinking about the severed head.<br><br>But today I was rereading Plutarch on Crassus and Pompey and then moved on to the Bacchae and came across this coincidence between the two.
<br><br>Crassus was very much like the Bush family.<br><br>Jerry<br>