Return with Taylor Caldwell to ancient Greece [in "Glory and the Lightning"], where characters in desperation are wont to cry: "Wine, in the name of the gods." At an Athenian dinner party, you can hear the architect Phidias say: "Ah, yes, Pericles, I am at your service. I have the sketches drawn, for the Parthenon." Puts you right into the classic picture, where the Acropolis, in its day, was a bigger provocation than the Albany Mall.

There are other social parallels, if you look for them, in the spectacle of a high but weakened civilization being overwhelmed by a determined force of hairies, the Spartans. And there are stirrings of feminism, too, even in the fifth century B.C., the heyday of the brainy courtesan, Aspasia…. A dormitory student at a school for courtesans, Aspasia confounds her math teacher, science teacher and gym teacher: ("… suddenly all was fire...