Greek Fire — Clara Rising

From the peaceful summits of Delphi to the political turmoil that spawned democracy, the story of Athens becomes a paradigm, if not a photocopy predicting the history of western civilization. To understand Pericles, who lived its dreams, is a lesson in forbearance for our own time. Guts and imagination built "the glory that was Greece." Despite war and plague, defeat and disaster, an idea was born that is still the hope of mankind. We glibly accept our freedom as a birthright, but never has that freedom seemed more precarious or more precious than now, in the 21st century. To meet the people who caused democrary to happen-the cunning Themistocles, the steadfast Leonidas, the legendary Cleisthenes-is an experience as enduring as Mt. Parnassus. Enduring too, is the love between Pericles and Aspasia, a beautiful, brilliant girl from Miletus, in Ionia. Their love affair is one of the greatest in ancient history. Some have said that Aspasia inspired the building of the Parthenon. The Parthenon, too, becomes a character, with its own secrets, including the 192 horesman on its inner frieze-the exact number of Greeks buried at Marathon-and a treasury room at the western end that once held the golden throne used by Xerxes to watch his victory at Salamis, which became, instead, the defeat that ended Persia's tyranny over Greece. THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY: The Story of Pericles is the result of five years' intensive research. Technically, it is fiction, but the author agrees, with Gore Vidal, that the term "fiction" does not necessarily mean "false." On the contrary, the imagination necessary to transfer fact into something that can be felt with emotions is often closer to the truth than cold statistics. Or at least Clara Rising (Ph.D. English/Philosophy, retired professor of Humanities) thinks so. Mother of four, grandmother of six, great-grandmother of one, in her 80th year she rides an Arabian who became the model for the little mare Pericles canters in Chapter One.