Greece

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 6 NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — The three front-runners vying for the presidency of ethnically split Cyprus wound down their campaigns Friday, putting pronouncements of their leadership credentials ahead of issues two days before the election. Opinion polls indicate that none of the three, who are all close associates of outgoing President Nicos Anastasiades, will muster more than half of the vote — the bar for an outright win in Sunday's voting. The top two finishers will likely face each other in a runoff election a week later. Some 561,000 citizens are eligible to vote. Averof Neophytou, 61, who took over the leadership of the country’s Democratic Rally party from Anastasiades, doubled down on his "safe choice" campaign theme, portraying himself as a steady hand with a surfeit of experience who can get things done. “I’ve also understood that those who profess to usher … [Read more...] about Cyprus presidential candidates push leadership credentials

In the third-century B.C. Greek epic poem the Argonautica, the sorceress Medea wields fragrance as a magical weapon: In order to steal the coveted Golden Fleece, which is guarded by a dragon, she lulls the creature to sleep with a scented potion, escaping unscathed. According to Dr. Britta Ager, an American classicist and the author of “ The Scent of Ancient Magic ” (2022), fragrance has long been associated with witchcraft and supernatural powers. “Across time and space, there’s a gut-level connection that humans instinctively make between scent and magic,” she says. Because the two things are “both immaterial but at the same time affect us profoundly,” she continues, in the classical world, the workings of scent were often seen as analogous to the supposed workings of magic. In ancient Greece, perfume was used in rituals ranging from the casting of simple farming spells to more elaborate religious ceremonies. The Oracle of Delphi was said to enter a trance by breathing in scented … [Read more...] about The Smell of Magic

M. H. Abrams, who transformed the study of Romanticism with the critical histories “The Mirror and the Lamp” and “Natural Supernaturalism,” and who edited the first seven editions of “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” a virtual Bible in literature survey courses, died on Tuesday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 102. Cornell University, where he taught for nearly 40 years, announced his death on Wednesday. On its publication in 1953, “The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition” was greeted as an instant classic. With fluid ease, Professor Abrams distilled the arguments of philosophers and critics from ancient Greece onward as he delineated a radical shift in aesthetics in the early 19th century, set in motion by poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The change was expressed by several ruling images, or “constitutive metaphors,” as Professor Abrams called them, chiefly the mirror and the lamp. For neoclassical writers like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, … [Read more...] about M.H. Abrams, 102, Dies; Shaped Romantic Criticism and Literary ‘Bible’