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1991 Cadillac Fleetwood Repair and Maintenance
A guide to problems, costs, maintenance and repair for your 1991 Cadillac Fleetwood
Verified by mechanics, reported by drivers like you
Ask a mechanic in our community
Never overpay. Check prices with our estimator
1991 Cadillac Fleetwood ProblemsAC compressor may leak and make noise
The AC compressor may develop an abnormal noise or refrigerant leak, requiring replacement.
Problems with anti-theft systems using the raised-chip key can prevent the car from starting. The wires in the steering column to the ignition lock cylinder tend to break. The key and ignition lock cylinder should be replaced to correct this condition.
1991 Cadillac Fleetwood QuestionsDo I need a new BCM? (1 answer)
My compressor was not coming on by itself and i wanted to hard wire it to the back of the electronic climate control. I used a test light to see which wire had power. When I found the wire, my test light slipped and i touched the wire next to the one with power and i shorted everything out. The f...
Car lost 100% battery charge just overnight. First time this ever happened. Please help to find step by step visual instruction and sizes & type of tools needed. Thank you.
Can not find a 710 cap at any stores.
1991 Cadillac Fleetwood RecallsCadillac Recalls 1991-1993 Models Due to Transmission Cooler Line Leak
Cadillac has recalled 1991-1993 Cadillac DeVille and Fleetwood vehicles because the upper transaxle cooler line may leak. In the presence of an ignition source, a fuel leak in the engine compartment may result in a fire. Dealers will replace the upper transaxle cooler line.


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Elegant and comfortable accommodations in a historic Louisville Kentucky Inn. Romantic suites with spa tubs, steam showers and fireplaces. Fine linens, complimentary coffee, tea and snacks and full gourmet breakfast served in room or the dining room.
Experience the incredible exhilaration of a hot air balloon ride! At Balloon Odyssey, we fly with the finest pilots available. We have been flying passenger rides in Louisville since 1974. A balloon ride is a wonderful gift for that special someone.
Located in the "Old Louisville Historic District" the inn features a total of 18 rooms and 11 fireplaces in the architecture of the original 1884 construction with 7 guest rooms decorated with period antiques and furnishings. Full breakfast.
Louisville is the perfect destination to start/end your Bourbon Country adventure. Nowhere else in America will you find 7 of the best stocked & most celebrated whiskey bars in the world on the city's Urban Bourbon Trail.
Voted # 1 in US as the B&B with the Most Historical Charm, Best B&B in Kentucky by Readers of KY Monthly Magazine, Best Breakfast in Southeast. Beautiful country estate setting in Central KY, located on Bourbon, Lincoln, Civil War, and Wine Trails.
Dog days of summer giving you the blues..... Well hit the river for a dog gone good time at Mutt E. Waters..... Kayak, Canoe , and all inclusive Riverside Camping Packages available.
At the Hidden Cave Ranch we have 5 beautiful decorated Guest rooms to choose from. All our beds, tables and nightstands are "homemade" from cedar logs cut in our own woods. You can meet our Curly Horses, a unique hypoallergenic horse breed.
RV Park and Campground. Located on the Kentucky River. Year round sites for RVs and seasonal tent camping. 40 years of Family vacations. Pot lucks, Music festivals, canoeing, indoor pavilion, boating, swimming.
Amidst the beautiful hills of Renfro Valley, our campground offers you an opportunity to experience an award winning camping or RV vacation. Here you can enjoy the superior campground standards that campers have grown to expect at KOA. Catch some of
Select your destination in Louisville Kentucky. Browse thousands of listings for accommodations, adventures, tours and travel services.

subset: commoncrawl


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Blog | Active Topics | Comic Archives | Webstore | RSS feed | Licensing | Sponsor
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How would you deal with America's anger issues?
Vote for the angry party to change things.
Vote for a less angry party to, I dunno, change things?
Don't vote at all, to make a point.
Moving to Canada is sounding better and better.
Just back away slowly, don't get involved, and hope that the USA takes their meds.
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And we now have an Amazon.ca affiliation for our Canadian fans.
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The Joy of Tech is a comic about technology and pop culture, created by Nitrozac and Snaggy, and updated three times a week. We like to feature the people and events that are making today's tech and pop culture news.
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Among the many good causes, this one is high on my list. Some anti-slavery groups and more, from CNN:
http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.c ... nizations/
Ending Slavery
Discuss the application of the Dharma to situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering and injustice.
2 posts • Page 1 of 1
- Nicholas Weeks
- Posts: 2450
- Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2009 4:21 am
Ending Slavery
Every time you recite Amita Buddha's name, a ray of light shines through empty space. If you recite very sincerely, then this light fills up the universe, so that the energy of all worlds will be auspicious and harmonious.
Master Hsuan Hua
Master Hsuan Hua
Re: Ending Slavery
This is an excellent topic, Will.
DGA's PhD dissertation, a history of "mindfulness," is available here:
https://www.academia.edu/25482900/WHAT_ ... _OF_STRESS
https://www.academia.edu/25482900/WHAT_ ... _OF_STRESS
2 posts • Page 1 of 1
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In the past data contained within an application was only available through a limited number of predefined interfaces. Contrast this to the scenario today where users demand to see data in a myriad of formats and want to use it where it makes the most sense for them. At times this will be through a web site, a dedicated client application or provided as a data source for another application altogether. Come to this session to learn about mechanisms to surface data from within an application and some useful design patterns that assist in this process.
John-Daniel Trask, Mindscape, New Zealand
Play (in Silverlight) Download (WMV) Download (MP3)


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I've found a catch-22, and I can't seem to code my way out of it.
I've turned off "Post events to Homepage", however, I have a widget at the bottom area that displays "Recent Updates". This list isn't populated with the events, however, when browsing other parts of the site (presumably anything BUT the homepage), the Recent Updates populates correctly.
How am I to keep the events off the homepage, but on for the widget(s)?
I have my example page located at http://www.goodfriendsrecords.com/nu/
The widget in question is at the bottom left hand side.
Thanks for your time!


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People A-Z
Brandee Norris
Executive Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Engagement
Dept: Advancement
Fax: 740.376.4989
Office: Mills 301 suite
Year appointed: 2009
Norris serves as the Director of the Marietta Fund. Her primary role is to conduct fundraising efforts with the Office of Advancement, manage the Marietta Fund professional and student staff and to provide leadership to the Marietta Fund's strategic initiatives addressing donor participation and leadership annual giving.
Norris is no stranger to fundraising in a university setting. She has worked to implement a variety of annual fund raising initiatives at a handful of institutions including Johns Hopkins University, Lipscomb University and Ohio Dominican University. Most recently, Norris served as the program manager within the MASTERS division of RuffaloCODY, a national fundraising services firm based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.


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Fuel suppliers have said thay are struggling to cope with a week's demand in just one day.
They called for calm as demand at the pumps across the UK increased amid fears of blockades at refineries and resultant shortages reminiscent of the 2000 fuel crisis.
The UK Petroleum Industry Association (UKPIA), which represents firms such as Shell, BP, Esso and Total, said there was no need for motorists to panic.
Chris Hunt, UKPIA's director-general, said tankers delivering fuel to the forecourts had been increased by 10 per cent to 15 per cent.
He said: "We have had a week's-worth of demand in one day.
"I believe folks are still queuing up, but there is absolutely no need to do so.
"There is absolutely no problem with fuel supply.
"It's merely an issue of getting the tankers to the filling stations."
He said that, following predictions of a shortage in the national media, it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As for threats of possible blockages at refineries, he said he was "not unduly worried".
He said the UKPIA was liaising with police and the Department for Trade and Industry to limit any protest actions later this week.
David Eglington, spokesman for Esso, said deliveries of fuel to forecourts around the UK were going on as usual today.
He said: "We would ask customers to continue purchasing as normal."
Total UK said in a statement: "As a result of media speculation, we have been experiencing higher than normal purchasing levels in some areas, and are now faced with limited product availability at a small number of service stations.
"Our logistics teams are working hard to ensure that any disruption and inconvenience to our customers is kept to a minimum. We would like to assure our customers there are currently no problems with the supply of fuel from either our refineries or terminals.
"In the event of fuel protests in the coming days, we are closely monitoring this situation and are working closely with the DTI on contingency plans in the event of protests."


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H.RES.697: Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 5973) making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2013, and for other purposes; and providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 5972) making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2013, and for other purposes.
|Virginia Foxx, R-NC
|June 21, 2012
|House Veterans' Affairs
Bill Progress
- Bill introduced in the House
- Bill passed in the House
- Bill passed in the Senate
- Bill signed into law
Bill Actions
Last Action
|June 26, 2012
|Motion to reconsider laid on the table Agreed to without objection.
|June 26, 2012
|On agreeing to the resolution Agreed to by recorded vote: 229 - 166 (Roll no. 413). (View this vote)
|June 26, 2012
|On ordering the previous question Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 226 - 168 (Roll no. 412). (View this vote)
|June 26, 2012
|DEBATE - The House proceeded with one hour of debate on H. Res. 697.
|June 26, 2012
|Considered as privileged matter.
|June 21, 2012
|The House Committee on Rules reported an original measure, H. Rept. 112-545, by Ms. Foxx.
|June 21, 2012
|Placed on the House Calendar, Calendar No. 139.
|June 21, 2012
|Resolution provides for the consideration of H.R. 5973 and H.R. 5972. In both instances, each bill shall be debatable for one hour, equally divided and controlled. Each bill shall be read by paragraph and shall be open to amendments. The resolution also provides for consideration of a concurrent resolution providing for an adjournment during the month of July.


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A new study done in Australia has revealed a startling finding that people who get more sun and vitamin D have lower chances of getting multiple sclerosis than those who do not get enough sun and have lower Vitamin D levels.
In what can be termed as a major breakthrough for patients suffering from the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS), scientists have discovered that the body's own stem cells can successfully repair the damaged nerves of the central nervous system.
Disclosing the long kept secret, 'Real Housewives of D.C.' star Michaele Salahi has revealed in her recently released book that she is suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS).
A former employee at Oprah Winfrey's new venture OWN has accused the network of oppression and ill-treatment.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel approved the first line treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) Gilenia is the first oral drug that Novaritis, a German drug maker, would sell under this brand name.
Washington D.C. has finally approved the use of medical marijuana, stating that people suffering from certain chronic illnesses can obtain larger amounts of the drug from select dispensaries in the city.
A detailed genetic study of identical twins by researchers in the U.S. has found that the autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), still remains shrouded in mystery.
Rochester, NY, January 23 -- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its nod to a drug meant for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) and those who experience difficulties in walking.
Chicago, June 9: It is widely known that breastfeeding is the most nutritious way to feed an infant. Now a new research has found that, besides meeting baby's need for optimum nutrition, breastfeeding can significantly reduce the risk of relapse of multiple sclerosis.


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VFW plans concert to raise funds for charity work
Published: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 2:23 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 2:23 p.m.
A benefit concert Saturday for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5206 will hopefully bring in money for more charity work, Commander Matt Davis said.
Want to go?
What: Benefit concert for VFW Post 5206 with Artimus Pyle, Johnnie Blackwell bands
When: 6 to 11 p.m. Saturday
Where: 900 N. Main St.
Cost: $40, advance; $50, at the door
Information: 828-693-5930
The post has been running low on funds after a rocky fall season, when it briefly closed after in-fighting broke out between members, he said.
The concert will feature Artimus Pyle, the drummer from Lynyrd Skynyrd and a 2006 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Pyle donated his time.
"The VFW has not had to spend one single penny on this concert," Davis said.
A limited number of tickets are available for the concert, which will be held from 6 to 11 p.m. at the post at 900 N. Main St. The post can accommodate around 350 people, and has so far sold about 100 tickets. Tickets in advance cost $40 and will be $50 at the door. Davis said he hoped the post would raise $20,000, but ticket sales have been slow.
This is the first "big" event for the post, and Davis hopes there's more to come.
"This is our first kick at it," he said. "Though, through Artimus, we've spread the news of others wanting to come to play."
A portion of the proceeds will benefit Veterans Restoration Quarters, an organization for homeless veterans in Asheville. Davis said the post also wants to support Bares It All for Breast Cancer and other local nonprofits.
"We've had smaller concerts and dances to raise money," he said. "It's just never enough to give back."
Davis added that the VFW Riders Group will host fundraising poker runs in the future. The VFW is going through renovations and Davis said they will hold a membership drive Saturday.
"This place is established for people to have friendship and family," he said.
Johnnie Blackwell Band will kick off the concert. There will also be 50/50 raffles and other raffles throughout the night.
For more information or for tickets, call 828-693-5930.
Reach Goodman at 828-694-7867 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.


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Maj. Nicholas Moses returned to Colorado after a twelve moth deployment Thursday. His first order of business was to go straight to the principal's office.
"It used to be one of my dreams to be a teacher or principal one day, now I get to be a principal for a day," he said.
Moses is a contingency contracting officer, but isn't part of a unit with Fort Carson because his headquarters is actually in San Antonio. Because of that, he didn't attend the same welcome home ceremony held for other soldiers on the Mountain Post Thursday morning.
Instead, Moses and his wife Deborah planned to hide in the principal's office at Fountain Middle School. Their daughter, Imane, was called in with a decidedly worried look on her face and literally jumped when she saw her father sitting where she expected the principal to be.
"This is the number one student," Moses said looking at his daughter.
This was Moses' fifth deployment.


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Skip to comments.The Tea Party and the GOP: a marriage that isnt working
Posted on 03/03/2012 10:25:08 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Lets be honest, the marriage between the Republican Party and the tea party has always been a marriage of convenience and an uncomfortable marriage of convenience at best. Unfortunately, this marriage is no longer working and it is time for both sides to move on. Call it irreconcilable differences.
The split doesnt have to be a contentious one. The two can part as friends: certainly plenty of establishment Republicans would be happy to be free of the tea party, free to go back to doing business the way they have always done business; and there are growing numbers inside the tea party movement who would be happy to see the movement reassert its political independence.
To be fair, this marriage had little chance of succeeding long-term from the very beginning. The tea party was as much a reaction to the big-government excesses of the Republican Party as it was a reaction to the big-government excesses of the Democratic Party.
Many in the tea party movement believed that the Republican Party could be changed, could be saved from its big-government ways. It was certainly fair to surmise that changing the Republican Party into a truly limited-government party would be easier than changing the party of FDR, LBJ and Barack Obama.
Most of the Republican and conservative establishment has been leery of the tea party from the very beginning. Indeed, many within the Republican and conservative establishments were openly critical of the tea party. Social conservatives like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and current presidential candidate and former senator Rick Santorum all bemoaned the tea partys lack of focus on social issues and the tea party movements libertarian streak.
Moderate talking heads like David Brooks and David Frum, along with their ideological soul mates on the Hill, attacked the tea party as radical and ridiculed tea party activists as politically naïve.
Both the moderate and the conservative establishment types feared that the dirty, unwashed masses of the tea party might actually change how things are done in Washington leaving them and their K Street buddies out of power and out of work.
Of course, once it became clear that the tea party was going to be a force actually the force in the 2010 midterms, Republicans of all stripes suddenly had a change of heart. The tea party became the proverbial prettiest girl at the political dance, and the Republican Party was all for a quickie Vegas wedding.
Unfortunately, like most quickie Vegas weddings, the marriage between the GOP and the tea party simply hasnt worked out: certainly not for the tea party.
The tea party brand, a brand that was once popular among average Americans, has suffered under the politically poisonous weight of being seen as little more than an appendage of the GOP. Part of what made the tea party so popular to begin with was that it was not seen as a wholly owned subsidiary of either of the failed political parties. Indeed, surveys showed that up to 40% of tea party members didnt describe themselves as Republicans.
Now, unfortunately, the tea party is seen as just another Republican Party interest group. Another interest group to be used for fundraising and to turn out votes on Election Day, and then to be ignored when the politicians get back to doing the work of Washington.
The Republican Party, believing that we have nowhere else to turn politically, treats the tea party and tea party activists with the same plantation mentality that the Democratic Party treats minorities in this country.
Nowhere is this mentality more present than in the Republican primary for president. Its simply preposterous to believe that any of the three front-runners Romney, Santorum or Gingrich can claim the tea party mantle. Mitt Romney is the candidate of the establishment, a flip-flopping Massachusetts moderate whose healthcare plan was the basis for Obamacare. Rick Santorum has been openly hostile to the tea party movement, saying he will fight the libertarian right, and Newt Gingrich is a career politician who lobbied for the very entities responsible for the crash of the housing market.
The truth is that the tea party movement is bigger than just one candidate or one election. Our country is facing big challenges: out-of-control spending, a federal government that has grown beyond its constitutional bounds and an exploding federal debt that has us on the brink of fiscal ruin.
The tea party is still the best chance we have for righting our fiscal ship. To do so, however, we must declare our political independence once again. We as a movement need to make it clear that we will continue to fight for what is right, regardless of partisan labels, and that we will support candidates who share our values whether they are Republicans, Libertarians, independents or even Democrats.
It is time for the tea party to stand on its own again, to stand for what is right and to stand up to partisan politics as usual.
-- Andrew Dodge is the former head of the Maine Tea Party Patriots and a current independent U.S. Senate candidate in Maine. Christopher R. Barron is a Republican political consultant and co-founder of GOProud, a national organization for gay conservatives and their allies. He blogs at Red Barron.
The Tea Party and the GOP: a marriage that isnt working for Democrats.
I'm waiting for the Whigs to rise again.
Fortunately, we don't live in a no-fault state. Thanks SeekAndFind.
The points are valid. I don't care what he looks like or does in his spare time.
It is obvious that the article is just an attempt to boost the viablitlity of the author's "independent" candidacy for office. That said, he makes some valid points.
Conservatives have no political party to call home. The GOP is merely the lesser of two evils. The GOP candidate of choice is Romney, a liberal. He would make a fine Democrat candidate. The lines distinguishing the two parties are very much a blur.
Conservatives are left with two options. 1) start their own party or 2) take over the GOP. Starting a new, viable conservative party is folly. Taking over the GOP is an uphill battle. Of the two choices, at least the uphill battle is one that can be won.
Me too.
But it's the only vehicle we have to stop Obama and the commies this election. They are pressing ahead with their agenda whether the GOP and the Tea Party are aligned or not.
However the first Wednesday in November 2012 is a good day to start another party with a 10th Amendment/liberty foundation...but very strong on real politic, borders and National Defense.
And there in lies the salty rub for this (social) conservative and others (I'm sure). The sooner the conservative right comes to grips with this reality the sooner they can start to coalesce around the principles of an independent (of the Republican Party) effort free of the destructive influences of the Washington Republicans and their ilk and mindset.
Nor for the social conservatives.
Precisely what I was thinking as well. Never mind that he writes for GOProud (sp), that does not invalidate any in the least what he has said here. IMO he is spot on the money.
"Christopher R. Barron is a Republican political consultant and co-founder of GOProud, a national organization for gay conservatives and their allies."
In other words he's a jackass who wears elephant-hide boots.
Like an openly admitted sodomite has any idea what it is talking about.
GO Proud ly to the Democrats... pervert.
Of course the marriage isn't working. The GOP is cheating on the tea party with liberals.
I went to:
There is nothing about cutting social security, medicare, medicaid or any of the other dominant socialist programs.
There is nothing against socialism at all.
So, the Tea Party is useless they articulate actual things that will bring about the possibility of the core beliefs listed on the above link.
The TEA party was a good start, but the second it starts encroaching on socialist entitlement programs, it will lose it's support.
It's just like the GOP, only slightly different versions of the status quo.
I don't think it has worked out too well for fiscal conservatives either. That leaves the Republican establishment that got what it wanted. Control of one house of the Congress. With that they have enough power to get their pork through and too hell with that bunch of TeaParty yahoos. So far this election season, I do not see one Republicrat I would demean my vote for.
I would love to see a TEA Party evolve, but only if Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin write the platform. I think it is doable, but it has to have credibility, not something cobbled together by assorted so-called tea party "leaders".
I can't PING this one enough!
"We can't continue wait another 24 years hoping for that uphill battle to have positive effects."
You can start a major political party from scratch and have it compete with the two existing parties in less than 24 years — something that hasn't happened since before the Civil War? If so, please go right ahead.
Conservatives have been able to get a few of their own elected within the GOP (West, Rand Paul and Rubio come to mind). It's not much of a start, true, but is a start. Conservatives lack any kind of organization as it is. It would be easier if conservatives could organize to simply take over an existing party.
If some other conservative party pops up I will be glad to support it but they seem to be in short supply at the moment.
No politician will succeed by telling the truth - that socialism in America has to stop. They know they won't get elected.
What marriage? There never was any marriage?
David Frum??? feh. If anything, the GOP is dead. Going back to doing things the way they've always been done IS the problem. The author is dense as a stone. After these primaries, I'm switching to Independent.
You're right. Barron is no friend of ours. The Tea Party is great on cutting government. But libertines like Barron go out of their way to alienate the socially conservative wing of the party.
Libertarians fail to recognize that social conservatives like Catholic bishops are fighting in the trenches against ObamaCare. Although squishy on ObamaCare when it first passed, the bishops are now fiercely against the birth control mandate. But libertarians (crazed by promiscuous sex) are nowhere to be seen.
I agree. The death of the GOP has been coming on for some time, but the future fiscal problems of the US will make it clear that the GOP has no clue and no solutions.... and mark my word, people will be demanding solutions, not talk.
Because we've seen in Europe what happens when people try to talk fiscal problems to death. The fiscal problems refuse to die.
Numbers are like that. They can't be nuanced away by erudition and limp-wristed prose. They have to be dealt with.
The GOP has only one chance to pull their head out of their nether regions now, and that's to come up with credible plans for cutting spending - and these plans have to include cutting defense spending too. A trillion dollars per year of spending needs to be cut immediately in the first year of any credible plan. A half-trillion dollars needs to be cut from government spending the year after that, again, for the plan to be credible.
The Catholic Church is a large part of the reason why there is so much government spending in the first place. They've tried to have their cake and eat it too: they want welfare and poverty programs, but they don't want to be told what to do.
The broke bread with socialists, now they get to do their bidding.
The bishops' protests will go nowhere and do nothing, because the Church will continue to try to have their cake and eat it too. The only way the Church can exhibit any power is to preach a message of independence of government to their congregations and make the votes on which the Democratic Party have been able to county... go away. The Catholics don't need to go out and vote Republican, but they need to stop voting Democratic.
That's not about to happen. Ever.
So the Democratic Party will do whatever is necessary to get the bishops off their back for now, and they'll come back with another bribe to the Church that makes the mandate go down more smoothly.
There is no such thing as a "social conservative" without fiscal conservatism. You can't be in favor of the government respecting conservative social institutions and beliefs if you're in favor of the government taking someone else's property by force and spreading it around in the name of "social justice."
FerociousRabbit said:
"Of the two choices, at least the uphill battle is one that can be won."
Here, I think FR errs. It is possible to win an uphill battle.... if your enemy is only on the top of the hill.
Once you're trying to fight both uphill and downhill... you don't even have the option of falling back. And that's where conservatives are now within the GOP: The opposition on the top of the hill are the liberals and free-spenders, and the GOP is stabbing us in the back.
There's no way to take over the GOP from the inside. None. I think this election and the last one show that quite well. The way Bush was elected in 2000 wasn't that he took over the GOP, it was that Bush brought in a whole organization from Texas with him. Bush effectively moved around the GOP hacks in DC by having such a large team in place before he started that the GOP couldn't stop him.
Come 2008, however, we saw the first act of the GOP insiders vs. conservatives. The GOP insiders won.
This time, we're seeing it again. And again, the GOP insiders are winning.
The only way to win now is to not play their game, on even on their turf. That's what setting up a new party would do. The other thing that setting up a new party would do is what the marketing people call "branding." There's lots of idiots and hacks who can call themselves "Republican" and as long as conservatives persist in staying within the GOP, they have to put up with being lumped in with these idiots (like Romney and other RINO squishies) who call themselves Republicans as well.
Ah, but a new party could set up a whole new "brand" and insure that it stands for a small, tightly focused list of positions to which all candidates under the new party label MUST adhere. The party platform should allow no diversion on this small list of issues, so there is no "brand" dilution. The list could be as small as three issues:
1. Reduce federal spending.
2. Simplify taxation, everyone has to pay *something*.
3. Reduce regulations and intrusion of the federal government.
If a new party were formed that enforced discipline upon it's members on those three issues (eg, any member of the party in congress who sponsors or votes for legislation that violates these principles is kicked out of the party, has to return campaign funds, etc), it would have more success than "conventional wisdom" predicts.
Well said. I hope the bishops have seen the light with the birth control issue. You break bread with socialists and you lose your soul.
Fortunately, weekly church-going Catholics tend to vote more conservative (McCain and Bush). We need a revitalization of the church itself, increasing church participation and enthusiasm. As you say, bishops should preach independence from the modern empire of big government. Just as early Christians sought freedom from the Roman Empire.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


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School board: Higher pay for teachers now
- Details
- Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 11:32
- Published on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 11:32
- Hits: 3660
KG needs to be more competitive with other divisions, officials say
The King George School Board discussed a new three-year proposal for adjustments to the teacher salary scale from Superintendent Rob Benson to make salaries more competitive with surrounding counties.
But school board members said at the Dec. 15 meeting they wanted higher pay sooner for teachers.
Mike Rose said salaries would be a "big focus" for them in the coming year.
Schools eye more competitive teacher pay
- Details
- Last Updated on Tuesday, 21 October 2014 10:30
- Published on Tuesday, 21 October 2014 10:30
- Hits: 6758
The King George School Board has been given options for adjusting its teacher salary scale to make its pay more competitive with surrounding counties and achieve uniform increments between its steps.
The Oct. 14 proposal from Superintendent Rob Benson has a two-year implementation plan. It would raise salaries by 17.5 percent from the current amount through 2016-17.
School Board mulls raising teachers' pay
- Details
- Last Updated on Tuesday, 07 October 2014 12:52
- Published on Tuesday, 07 October 2014 10:18
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The King George School Board is mulling an option to 'fix' its teacher salary scale by providing uniform increments between each step.
KG division hoping for a 2nd $100K school grant
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 16 July 2014 00:53
- Published on Wednesday, 16 July 2014 00:53
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Funding would go for school security equipment for Sealston and King George Elementary
Superintendent Rob Benson announced this week at the July 14 School Board meeting that the King George school division is applying for another $100,000 school security equipment grant this summer.
At Monday's meeting, Benson told the School Board, "I have the application ready to go and to submit for Sealston and King George Elementary."
If the King George school division is awarded a grant this year, it will be used for the purchase and installation of a card swipe system that records door access with an alert system that can be monitored in the school office when a door is ajar.
Last year was the first year the state made the grant available, with the school division applying for and receiving a grant award in the maximum award amount of $100,000 to purchase and install those same access control systems at Potomac Elementary and King George Middle schools. The high school had a similar system installed when it was built a few years ago.
A local match of 25 percent of the grant amount is required.
That means that if the division receives notification of a grant award, the School Board would be required to take action to accept the grant and to designate a source of funding for the $25,000 required match.
Benson told The Journal he thought he could probably find the money in the 2014-15 budget adding he wouldn't want the division to miss out on the opportunity.
Last year the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) awarded the school security grants of varying amounts up to the maximum of $100,000 to 459 Virginia schools and regional education programs.
The grant application is due to the state by Aug. 1, with grant awards expected to be announced on Sept. 1.
Grant award notifications will be sent each year to school divisions by early September, informing the school division of the total grant award approved for each eligible school for which it applied. Grant funding will be disbursed on a reimbursement basis.
Phyllis Cook
School Board adopts revised budget reflecting state funding decrease
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 July 2014 10:57
- Published on Wednesday, 09 July 2014 10:57
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The King George School Board last week on June 30 amended its 2014-15 budget amounts and categorical distributions as recommended by division Superintendent Rob Benson to reflect lower state revenues.
While making reductions for the next fiscal year's bottom line to reduce expenditures and recognize slack existing in the budget, other action at the same meeting on the last day of the fiscal year was to encumber more of the surplus funds left at the end of the outgoing 2013-14 fiscal year. (See related article elsewhere in this issue.)
Read more: School Board adopts revised budget reflecting state funding decrease
Some School meal prices set to rise
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- Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 June 2014 09:54
- Published on Wednesday, 25 June 2014 09:54
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The King George School Board approved a few small increases earlier this month for some meals and associated prices at the schools. The price changes go into effect for next school year, 2014-15, which begins in September.
Other school fees will remain unchanged from the current year, and are also recounted below.


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Check out my blog Go Blogger (dot) net. It's about blogging world.
Comments about my blog are highly appreciated. Cheers :D


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Amazon.com Review
It's been a year since a meteor collided with the moon, catastrophically altering the earth's climate. For Miranda Evans, life as she knew it no longer exists. Her friends and neighbors are dead, the landscape is frozen, and food is increasingly scarce. The struggle to survive intensifies when Miranda's father and stepmother arrive with a baby and three strangers in tow. One of the newcomers is Alex Morales, and as Miranda's complicated feelings for him turn to love, his plans for his future thwart their relationship. Then a devastating tornado hits the town of Howell, and Miranda makes a decision that will change their lives forever.
Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Susan Beth Pfeffer, Author of This World We Live InDear Amazon reader, I love you.
No, I really do. I have loved you since the first of the Last Survivors trilogy, Life As We Knew It, was published. It was then that I began monitoring (such a nice euphemism for stalking) my Amazon ranking. I cheered when it dipped below 20,000 for the first time. I marveled when it landed at 7,777 and 6,666. When, for one glorious moment, it was in the extremely high three digits, I wrote an entire celebratory blog entry. I went through the same emotional extremes when the second volume, The Dead & The Gone, came out. When its Amazon ranking was lower than Life As We Knew It, I felt that same trill of excitement that I experienced when kid sister Serena beat Venus Williams for the first time. Now the trilogy is complete, with the publication of This World We Live In. I celebrated on July 13, 2009, at 4:06 p.m., when it debuted at 271,527. Each morning and afternoon and evening and night and occasionally at tea time, I check on all three books. It's like the Milwaukee Brewers Sausage Race. Now in first place is Life As We Knew It at 2,911, but fast on its heels is the up-and-comer This World We Live In at 2,983. Falling back to third place is The Dead & The Gone, at 3,240, from its midafternoon high of 2,829. Yes, dear Amazon reader, I love you. But could you please do something about my 1993 novel, The Ring of Truth? It's feeling very lonely at 5,235,538!
Susan Beth Pfeffer
(Photo © Marci Hanners)
From School Library Journal
(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


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The Parthenon Enigmaby Joan Breton Connelly
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Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West's ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it?
In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon's legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze's vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book's intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city's mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible.
The Parthenon's full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze's dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
Editorial Reviews
Alternately a cathedral, a mosque, and an archaeological ruin, the Parthenon atop Athens's Acropolis was constructed nearly 2,500 years ago (447–432 B.C.E.), on the site of an earlier temple, as a huge, "lavishly decorated" temple of Athena. Here, in contrast to tendencies to project upon it our modern "standards of what it means to be civilized," archaeologist and NYU classics professor Connelly (Portrait of a Priestess) urges readers "to see the Parthenon and the people who made it as they were." Using surviving snippets from a long-lost Euripides play, she argues that the Parthenon frieze isn't a snapshot of contemporary fifth-century B.C.E. Athenians "marching in their annual Panathenaic procession," but a mythological scene glorifying human sacrifice before a battle between followers of rivals Athena and Poseidon. Within the Parthenon sits a tomb shrine to those sacrificed heroines, whose associated cult was incorporated into the worship of Athena. Connelly's persuasive reinterpretation of the frieze will spark controversy among academics, as will her advocacy of the return to Greece of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles. But this detailed, smart, and tantalizing study offers much to savor while immersing readers in a "spirit-saturated, anxious world" at the mercy of mercurial gods. Illus. (Feb.)
"Exciting and revelatory. . . . That rare thing: the exposition of a truly great idea, and a reminder of what a thrilling subject the past, that foreign country, can be." —The New York Times Book Review
"Joan Connelly's brilliant study of the Parthenon shows how a myth can reveal as many secrets as a rock or a ruin, and how rethinking what we know about antiquity can help us better understand ourselves today." —George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars saga
"A detailed portrait." —The Washington Post
"More than ingenious. . . . The most convincing explanation of the entire Parthenon program so far put before us." —Nigel Spivey, Greece & Rome
"Learned, ambitious . . . up to date with the excellent theoretical work of recent decades. It is time to change the textbooks and the museum labels." —Times Literary Supplement.
"Connelly's theory is attractive and plausible, and is backed by a considerable breadth and depth of scholarship—archaeological, visual, and textual." —A.E. Stallings, The Weekly Standard (London)
"Original, insightful and convincing. . . . A very important book: thoroughly researched and written for the intelligent reader. . . . [Connelly] breaks new ground." —Huffington Post
"Connelly's groundbreaking work will forever change our conception of the most important building in the history of Western civilization. By cracking the hidden code of the Parthenon, she reveals the classical world in a radical new light that will reorient how we all view its legacy for the twenty-first century." —Tom Reiss, author of The Black Count, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"General readers with an interest in Greek history and architecture will find The Parthenon Enigma fascinating. . . . [It reads like a] supremely intelligent riff on a Dan Brown novel." —Richmond Times-Dispatch
"A careful, learned account and a good read." —The New York Review of Books
"Gracefully written, informative. . . . Engaging and intensely interesting. . . . Thoughtful, stimulating, and unquestionably valuable." —J.J. Pollitt, The New Criterion
"Connelly's interpretation [offers an] even positive message, one that speaks to the influence of the Parthenon in the fields of architecture, government and the very nature of civilized society." —New York Post
"Learned and elegant . . . a powerful case for a new understanding of the Parthenon, its original meaning as a religious object, and for the fullest possible restoration of its many parts still scattered far and wide." —Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Classics and History, Yale University, and author of The Peloponnesian War
"Masterly. . . . Connelly's depth of knowledge and scholastic effort shine through brilliantly." —Library Journal (starred)
"Luminous . . . courageously and intelligently starting from scratch, Joan Connelly reconstructs the meaning of the Parthenon. . . . The unfamiliar picture that emerges gives us all a sharper vision of what this timeless monument can still mean to our own troubled world." —Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University
"Gripping." —Metropolis Magazine
"Edifying. . . . A book for all who seek direction and are capable of seeing the bigger picture." —Kirkus
"Persuasive. . . . This detailed, smart, and tantalizing study offers much to savor." —Publishers Weekly
"Connelly's book is one for the twenty-first century, full of new finds and fresh insights." —Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
In this masterly volume, Connelly (classics, New York Univ., Portrait of a Priestess) delves into the significance of this Athenian wonder and presents a different interpretation of the frieze that encircles it. For centuries, scholars have interpreted the frieze as being of a Panathenaic procession seeking to honor Athena—the city's most important deity. Connelly's exhaustive inquiry into the intricate nature of the artwork, through a deep understanding of fifth-century Hellenic myth, history, and religion leads her to believe that the frieze seeks to tell the tale of King Erechtheus's three maiden daughters who willingly sacrificed themselves—as decreed by an oracle—to save the city-state of Athens from the approaching Eleusinian army. Connelly expertly re-creates the world engendered by the efforts of the great statesman Perikles, one in which the city-state was worthy of any sacrifice. The author suggests that the misreading of this "mirror in marble" has obscured the didactic message the edifice was intended to imbue in Athenians. VERDICT Connelly's depth of knowledge and scholastic effort shine through brilliantly. Her thorough research presents a convincing argument for newly comprehending the Parthenon's frieze and potentially reevaluating long accepted research on the subject. Enthusiastically recommended for all readers interested in ancient Greece.—Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM
Get out the dictionary and brush up on your Greek. Classical archaeologist Connelly's (Classics/New York Univ.; Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece, 2007, etc.) history and analysis of every square inch of the Parthenon requires close attention. "Never before in human history has there been a structure that is at once so visible to the world, so celebrated, so examined, so invested with authority, and yet, at the same time, so strangely impenetrable at its core," writes the author, who devotes the first third of the book to a deeply detailed history of the gods and myths of the Acropolis. The Parthenon is a portrait of the Athenians, their identity and perception of belonging. Greece had no sacred text and no culture media, but they stressed the importance of myth, landscape and memory. Myth and history were one and the same. When Connelly gets to the story of the founding family of Athens--Erechtheus, his wife, Praxithea, and their three daughters--the book picks up considerable speed. Much more than a sacred space, the Parthenon is the symbol of Athens' democracy, and the East Frieze explains the meaning of that democracy, the language of images paralleling the language of text. It shows how Erechtheus and Praxithea were prepared, even willing, to sacrifice their youngest daughter to avert an impending siege. Unknown to them, their daughters had pledged that if one died, so would they all; thus, the two remaining sisters threw themselves off the Acropolis. When Erechtheus was swallowed by the Earth, Athena instructed Praxithea to build the two temples we now see. It is not their sacrifice that illustrates democracy but the fact that no life is above another or the common good. The carvings of the Parthenon, the greatest masterpiece of Greek art, teach us the meaning of democracy. A book for all who seek direction and are capable of seeing the bigger picture--erudite if esoteric, edifying if somewhat exhausting.
Product Details
- 9780385350501
- Publisher:
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date:
- 01/28/2014
- Sold by:
- Random House
- Format:
- NOOK Book
- Pages:
- 512
- Sales rank:
- 414,315
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Read an Excerpt
Never before in human history has there been a structure that is at once so visible to the world, so celebrated, so examined, so invested with authority, and yet, at the same time, so strangely impenetrable at its core. After centuries of study and admiration, the Parthenon remains, in so many ways, an enigma.
The past three decades have brought perhaps the most intensive period of scrutiny the Parthenon has seen since its construction nearly twenty--five hundred years ago (447–-432 b.c.). The monumental work of the Acropolis Restoration Service in the conservation and analysis of the building has revealed a wealth of new information about how the Parthenon was planned, engineered, and constructed. Surprises, like newly revealed traces of bright paint on architectural moldings set high within the west porch, hint at the original, radiant decoration of the temple. At the same time, freshly emerging evidence from Greek literature, inscriptions, art, and archaeology has broadened our understanding of the world in which the Parthenon was built. The myths, belief systems, ritual and social practices, cognitive structures, even the emotions of the ancient Athenians, are now under rigorous review. But much of what has been discovered in recent years does not fit into the sense we have had of the Parthenon for the past two and a half centuries. Why?
Our contemporary understanding of the Parthenon and the symbolism that has been constructed for it from the Enlightenment on has everything to do with the self--image of those who have described and interpreted it. There is a natural tendency to see likeness to oneself when approaching a culture as foreign as that of Greek antiquity. How much more so this is when looking at a monument that has become the icon of Western art, the very symbol of democracy itself. With these labels comes a projection onto the Parthenon of all our standards of what it means to be civilized. In looking at the building, Western culture inevitably sees itself; indeed, it sees only what flatters its own self--image or explains it through connection to the birthplace of democracy.
This association has been reinforced again and again by the adoption of Parthenonian style for civic architecture beginning with the neoclassical movement and culminating in the Greek Revival. From the early nineteenth century on, financial and governmental institutions, libraries, museums, and universities have reproduced classical architectural forms to communicate a set of values, implicitly aligning themselves with the flowering of democratic Athens. One need only look at the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia (1811–-1824), the British Museum (1823–-1852), the U.S. Custom House on Wall Street (1842) (page 341), Founder's Hall at Girard College in Philadelphia (1847), the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C. (1836–-1869), the Ohio State Capitol (1857), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1928), or the U.S. Supreme Court Building (1935) to recognize quotations from the iconic form of the Parthenon.1 Ironically, these unequivocally secular civic structures have appropriated what is, fundamentally, a religious architectural form. Preoccupied with the political and the aesthetic, we have become all too comfortable with the constructed identity of Parthenon as icon, neglecting its primary role as a deeply sacred space.
Any views that depart from the well--established contemporary understanding of the Parthenon, and its association with civic life as we know it, have been effaced, like the traces of paint and intricate detail that once adorned the surface of the temple itself. Criticism of the conventional creed is taken as an attack on an entire belief system. The long--standing association of the Parthenon with Western political ideology has, indeed, caused new interpretations to meet with enormous resistance. But there is much more to the Parthenon and the people who created it than flatters and corresponds to our sense of ourselves. To recover it, we must begin by trying to see the monument through ancient eyes.
Viewing the Parthenon as synonymous with the Western democratic system of government began in the eighteenth century, when the art historian Johann Winckelmann first linked the emergence of individual liberty to the development of high classical style. In his influential book, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764), Winckelmann argued that the rise and decline of artistic styles followed developments in the political sphere. The peak of Greek art, he maintained, coincided with the democratic form of government.2 Nine years later his student Johann Hermann von Riedesel took this model a step further, proclaiming the Parthenon to be "the supreme product of Athenian democracy."3
This sentiment was robustly embraced during the Greek War of Independence (1821 to 1830) and the period that immediately followed it. As the modern Greek nation was forged, the European powers that helped to shape it constructed narratives through which they could trace their own political systems back to the epicenter of the Athenian Acropolis. On August 28, 1834, the newly designated king of Greece, Otto, son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, officially inaugurated the Parthenon as an ancient monument. In a carefully orchestrated pageant conceived in the very image of Periklean Athens, King Otto rode on horseback with his regents, court, and bodyguards while soldiers from the National Guard led a procession of citizen elders, teachers, guild officers, and other notables.4 Sixty Athenians marched with olive branches in hand, while on the Acropolis, Athenian maidens, dressed in white and carrying bows of myrtle, unfurled a banner displaying the image of Athena.5 Upon reaching the citadel, King Otto was presented with keys to its gate and escorted into the Parthenon by the neoclassical architect Leo von Klenze. There, the king was enthroned upon a chair covered in laurel, olive, and myrtle. Klenze delivered a rousing patriotic address, advocating the restoration of the Parthenon and the obliteration of every trace of Ottoman Turkish building on the Acropolis. "All the remains of barbarity will be removed," Klenze proclaimed. He then bade King Otto to sanctify the first marble drum to be restored to the "reborn Parthenon." The king obliged, tapping three times on the white marble column segment set before him.6 Klenze's vision of a barbarian--free Acropolis was fully realized in his "ideal view" of the Acropolis (following page), painted in 1846 and acquired by King Otto's father, Ludwig I, some six years later.7
In the century that followed, the growth of archaeology and an ever--increasing recognition of classical Greece as the cradle of Western civilization elevated classical cultural production to a whole new level.8 In 1826 work began on a replica of the Parthenon atop Calton Hill just east of Edinburgh. Designed as the National Monument of Scotland to memorialize Scottish soldiers and sailors lost in the Napoleonic Wars, it would become, people hoped, the final resting place for a host of Scottish notables. The structure was never completed, and the single façade that stands today is marked with an inscription that reads, "A Memorial of the Past and Incentive to the Future Heroes of the Men of Scotland."9 Meanwhile, just above Regensburg in Bavaria, King Ludwig I built his own Parthenon (1830–-1842), designed by the same Leo von Klenze of the ceremony on the Acropolis. Named Walhalla, "the Hall of the Dead" (facing page), the Bavarian Parthenon was furnished with portrait busts and inscribed plaques commemorating more than a hundred famous individuals across eighteen hundred years of German history. By 1897 the United States could boast of its own Parthenon, built in Nashville, Tennessee, for the state's Centennial Exposition of 1896–-1897. The wooden structure was rebuilt in concrete in 1920–-1931 and remains a prized landmark of the city to this day (page xiv).10
By the twentieth century, Ernst Gombrich would hail the "Great Awakening" in Greek art as a product of the dawn of democracy. He viewed the "summit of its development" in the high classical period as a direct reflection of the "new freedom" experienced by artists working within the new political system.11 This positivist construct was perpetuated in a blockbuster exhibition of Greek art that traveled across the United States in 1992, celebrating the twenty--five hundredth anniversary of the birth of democracy. The show, titled The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy, treated viewers in Washington, D.C., and New York City to the very finest of surviving Greek art.12
The tendency to see oneself in ancient artistic masterpieces is not, however, limited to the adherents of any particular political ideology. Cecil Rhodes viewed the Parthenon as a manifestation not of democracy but of empire. "Through art, Pericles taught the lazy Athenians to believe in Empire," he maintained.13 Karl Marx, also attracted to Greek art, preferred to understand classical monuments as products of a society not at its peak but in its infancy. "The charm of [Greek] art," Marx argued, "was inextricably bound up" with "the unripe social conditions under which it arose."14 The splendor of high classical art in general, and the Parthenon in particular, would hold irresistible attraction for the fascist regime of Hitler's Germany, which readily appropriated it in the service of its ideological, cultural, and social agendas.15
Should we be surprised that Sigmund Freud's response to the Parthenon was one of guilt? He was tortured by the fact that he had been privileged to see a masterpiece that his own father, a wool merchant of modest means, could never have seen or appreciated. Indeed, Freud was riddled with guilt at the thought of having surpassed his father in this good fortune.16
In 1998, the editor Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, published in The Daily Telegraph an interview with a senior curator at the British Museum. Johnson quoted the curator as saying that the Elgin Marbles are "a pictorial representation of England as a free society and the liberator of other peoples."17 Thus, the Parthenon serves as both magnet and mirror. We are drawn to it, we see ourselves in it, and we appropriate it in our own terms. In the process, its original meaning, inevitably, is very much obscured.
Indeed, our understanding of the Parthenon is so bound up with the history of our responses to it that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the two. When the object of scrutiny has been thought so matchlessly beautiful and iconic, a screen for meanings projected upon it across two and a half millennia, it is all the more challenging to recover the original sense of it. What is clear is that the Parthenon matters. Across cultures and centuries its enduring aura has elicited awe, adulation, and superlatives. Typical of the gushing is that of the Irish artist and traveler Edward Dodwell, who spent the years 1801–-1806 painting and writing in Greece. Of the Parthenon he declared, "It is the most unrivaled triumph of sculpture and architecture that the world ever saw."18 This same sentiment inflamed Lord Elgin, less a man of words than of action. In fact, during the very years of Dodwell's stay in Athens, Lord and Lady Elgin and a team of helpers were busy taking the temple apart, hoisting down many of its sculptures and shipping them off to London, where they remain to this day.
Even the removal of its sculptures, however, could not dull the building's allure. In 1832, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, last of the Romantics, declared the Parthenon to be "the most perfect poem ever written in stone on the surface of the earth."19 Not long thereafter, the neo--Gothic architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet--le--Duc proclaimed the cathedral at Amiens to be "the Parthenon of Gothic Architecture."20 Even the great arbiter of twentieth--century modernism Charles--Édouard Jeanneret, later known as Le Corbusier, upon first seeing the Parthenon proclaimed it "the repository of the sacred standard, the basis for all measurement in art."21
And so the Parthenon's larger--than--life status has had a profound effect on the ways in which it has been scrutinized, what questions have been asked of it, and, more interesting, what questions have been left unasked. Too revered to be questioned too much, the Parthenon has suffered from the distortions that tend to befall icons. The fact that so few voices from antiquity survive to tell us what the Athenians saw in their most sacred temple has only enlarged the vacuum into which post--antique interpreters have eagerly rushed.
it has not helped the effort to recover original meaning that beginning in late antiquity, long after Athens had lost its independence, the Parthenon suffered a series of devastating blows. Around 195 b.c., a fire consumed the cella, the great room at the eastern end of the temple. At some point during the third or fourth century a.d., under Roman rule, there was an even more ruinous fire. Some scholars have pointed to the attack by the Germanic Heruli tribe in a.d. 267 as the cause of this destruction, while others have attributed it to the Visigoth marauders under Alaric, who plundered Athens in 396.22 Whatever the cause, the Parthenon's roof collapsed, destroying the cella. The room's interior colonnade, its eastern doorway, the base of the cult statue, and the roof had to be entirely replaced.23
The Parthenon's days as a temple of Athena were now numbered. Between a.d. 389 and a.d. 391, the Roman emperor Theodosios I issued a series of decrees banning temples, statues, festivals, and all ritual practice of traditional Greek polytheism. (It was Constantine who legalized Christianity, but it was Theodosios who outlawed its competition, making it the state religion.) By the end of the sixth century and possibly even earlier the Parthenon was transformed into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This conversion required a change in orientation, with a main entrance now smashed open at the western end of the structure and an apse added at the east (page 337). The westernmost room became a narthex, while a three--aisled basilica stretched toward the east in what had been the temple's cella. A baptistery was introduced at the building's northwest corner.24 By the late seventh century this church had become the city's cathedral under the name of the Theotokos Atheniotissa, the "God--Bearing Mother of Athens." When, in 1204, Frankish forces of the Fourth Crusade invaded, they converted the Greek Orthodox cathedral into a Roman Catholic one, renaming it Notre-Dame d'Athènes. A bell tower was added at its southwest corner. With the fall of Athens to the Ottoman Turks in 1458, the Parthenon was rebuilt once again, now as a mosque, complete with a mihrab, a pulpit, and a soaring minaret on the very spot where the bell tower had stood.
Having survived largely intact for more than two thousand years, the Parthenon suffered a catastrophic explosion on September 28, 1687. A week earlier, the Swedish count Koenigsmark and his army of ten thousand soldiers had landed at Eleusis, just fourteen kilometers to the northwest. There they joined the Venetian general Francesco Morosini for the siege of Athens, but one front in the larger Morean War, also known as the Sixth Ottoman--Venetian War, which lasted from 1684 to 1699. As the Venetian army advanced upon Athens, the Ottoman Turkish garrison defending the city barricaded itself on the Acropolis. The Turks had, by now, torn down the temple of Athena Nike at the western tip of the citadel and replaced it with a cannon platform. They stockpiled live ammunition within the walls of the Parthenon itself. Over six days, the Venetians blasted an estimated seven hundred cannonballs at the Parthenon, shooting from the nearby Museion Hill. Finally, Count Koenigsmark's men scored a direct hit. The Parthenon erupted in a violent explosion that sent its interior walls, nearly a dozen columns on its north and south flanks, and many of its decorative sculptures flying out in all directions. Three hundred people died that day on the Acropolis. The battle would rage on for another twenty--four hours before the Turkish troops capitulated.25
The sacred space of the Acropolis was thus forever changed, now acquiring a new iconic status as "ruin."26 By the early eighteenth century, a small square mosque was built within the rubble of what had been the Parthenon's cella. Made of brick and reused stones, the domed structure (with a three--bayed porch facing northwest; see page 338) sat within the fallen framework of the Parthenon's colonnade until it was damaged in the Greek War of Independence and subsequently removed in 1843.27
in some sense our bias toward seeing the Parthenon in political terms can be put down to a success of scholarship: the political sphere of Athens in the fifth century b.c. is the one we know best. The survival of a relative wealth of literature and inscriptions by, for, and about classical Athenians provides access to the world of Perikles, the general and politician who so shaped what is known today as the golden age of Greece, with which the flourishing of democracy is very much bound up. Yet there is much more to Athenian culture than democracy and more to its conception of democracy than what can be perceived by viewing it through a modern lens. For one thing, the Athenian notion of politics transcends our own. Politeia is difficult to translate in English; in fact, the word embraces all the conditions of citizenship in its widest sense. Ancient politeia extended far beyond the parameters of modern politics, embracing religion, ritual, ideology, and values. Aristotle intimates that the primacy of the "common good" played a definitive role in politeia, observing that "those constitutions that aim at the common good are in effect rightly framed in accordance with absolute justice."28
At the very core of Athenian politeia lies the culture's fundamental understanding of itself and its origins, its cosmology and prehistory-a nexus of ideas that defined the values of the community and gave rise to a complex array of ritual observances of which the Parthenon was the focal point for nearly a thousand years. Until now, the Parthenon has received relatively little consideration in this light. And yet without such understanding it is impossible to say satisfactorily just what the Parthenon is beyond a supreme architectural achievement or a symbol of a political ideal as understood by essentially foreign cultures in the remote future. If we are to recover the primordial and original meaning of the Parthenon, we must endeavor to see it as those who built it did. We must see it through ancient eyes, an effort that involves the archaeology of consciousness as much as of place.
This aim of discovering the ancient reality of the Parthenon has been advanced by recent archaeological and restoration efforts on the Acropolis as well as by fresh anthropological approaches that are ever widening our understanding of the ancient past. Concrete archaeological discoveries made by the Greek Ministry of Culture's Acropolis Restoration Service in its meticulous autopsy of the building have revealed new information on the materials, tools, techniques, and engineering employed in the Parthenon's construction.29 We now know many changes were introduced in the course of building the Parthenon, which may have included the pivotal addition of its unique and magisterial sculptured frieze. It has now been established that this frieze originally wrapped around the entire eastern porch of the temple. Two windows, on either side of the Parthenon's east door, allowed extra light to flood in upon the statue of Athena. Traces of a small shrine with an altar have been discovered in the temple's northern peristyle, marking the place of a previously unknown sacred space that predates the Parthenon.30 This opens the way for a new understanding of pre--Parthenon cult ritual and raises questions concerning the continuity of sacred space from deep antiquity to the age of Perikles.
The last decades have seen much more than the proliferation of new data on the design and evolution of the Parthenon as a building. They have also brought sweeping shifts in scholarship that allow us a view of the Parthenon in its more immaterial dimensions. New questions are being asked of the ancient evidence, with new research models and methods deployed to ask them, drawing on the social sciences and religious and cultural history. These have generated a fresh approach to monuments viewed within the fullness of a whole variety of ancient contexts.31 The study of Greek ritual and religion has burgeoned over the past thirty years.32 The embeddedness of religion in virtually every aspect of ancient Greek life is now fully recognized. The study of ancient emotions and also cognition is under way, revealing the effects of language, behavior, and multisensory experience on feeling and thinking in the ancient world.33 We are in a better position than ever before to get inside the heads of those who experienced the Acropolis in Greek antiquity.
Ongoing studies of reception, projection, and appropriation have exposed the ways in which aesthetic, ideological, and nationalist agendas have shaped interpretative frameworks over the past 250 years.34 Modern Western nostalgia for a link with the classical past, one that affirms the West's own political and cultural aspirations, is now recognized as a controlling force in the construction of narratives that have long dominated our understanding of the monuments. An awareness of an "other Acropolis" is emerging, one that seeks to build a multi--temporal and multisensory appreciation of the site and its buildings, including the Parthenon itself.35 Both of these forces—-the discovery of new evidence and the development of new questions and methods through which it can be examined—-are at work in forging the new paradigm for understanding the Parthenon that is proposed in this book.
The more we have discovered, the more enigmatic the Parthenon has come to seem, and the more inadequate appear the simplistic meanings ascribed to it by later cultures. As a vastly complex world of cult ritual and spiritual intensity reveals itself, it still remains to be asked of the structure at the very heart of so much strange, dark practice, "What exactly is the Parthenon?"
Of all the physical remains surviving from the classical period, the Parthenon's sculptured frieze is the largest and most detailed revelation of Athenian consciousness we have. This virtuosic triumph in the carving of marble, this moving portrayal of noble faces from the distant past, this "prayer in stone," the largest, most elaborate narrative tableau the Athenians have left us, provides a critical and essential way in. Just what is represented by the nearly four hundred figures carved upon it is a question of the utmost importance.
Since the fifteenth century a.d., the Parthenon frieze has been viewed as a snapshot of fifth century b.c. Athenians, and, from the seventeenth century, they have been understood to be marching in their Panathenaic, or all--Athenian, procession, a key event within the annual festival of Athena.36 But this reading places the frieze outside the standard conventions for Greek temple decoration, which regularly drew its subject matter not from contemporary reality but from myth. And so this astonishing ring of stone carving presents us with an enigma within that of the Parthenon itself.
In the pages that follow, I argue for a new interpretation of the frieze, one that stands in sharp contrast to what has become the orthodox view.37 My interpretation starts with religion, not politics, and through pattern recognition within the iconographic, textual, and ritual evidence I propose an understanding that challenges how we see both the Parthenon and the people who built it.
I argue that we are looking not at contemporary Athenians marching in their annual Panathenaic procession but at a scene from the mythical past, one that lies at the very heart of what it means to be an Athenian. A tragic saga unfolds, revealing a legendary king and queen who, by demand of the Delphic oracle, are forced to make an excruciatingly painful choice to save Athens from ruin. This choice requires nothing less than the ultimate sacrifice. Based on the lives of the founding king and his family, the charter myth manifest on the Parthenon frieze suggests a far darker and more primitive outlook than later cultures and classicists have been prepared to face. This harrowing tale provides a critical keyhole into Athenian consciousness, one that directly challenges our own self--identifications with it.
The Parthenon thus leads us toward an understanding remote from the Renaissance and Enlightenment stereotypes of philosophers and rhetoricians that we have become accustomed to imagine. In fact, Athenians were a far more foreign people than most feel comfortable acknowledging today. Theirs was a spirit--saturated, anxious world dominated by an egocentric sense of themselves and an overwhelming urgency to keep things right with the gods. Much of each day was spent asking, thanking, and honoring gods in an attempt to keep balance, reciprocity, and harmony with the all--powerful beings who could play with human fate. After all, Athenians were continuously threatened by war, violence, and death.
Spirit shadows, divinities, and heroes from the mythical past were a constant presence, fully inhabiting the landscape at every turn. Life was fragile, uncertain, never consistently happy, and full of surprises, except for the looming certainty of death.38 Calendars and the timing of cult rituals, religious festivals, athletic games, and theatrical performances were set by long--established tradition and regulated by the observance of the movement of celestial bodies in the night sky. Cosmology, landscape, and tradition bound ancient Athenians together within an ordered cycle of religious observance, remembrance, and ritual practice.39
The profound, compulsive religiosity of the Athenians, an aspect that earned them a reputation for being among the most "deisidaimoniacal," or "spirit--fearing," people in all of Greece, stands in contrast to our idealizing vision of a city inhabited by philosophical rationalists.40 That some Athenians might call out the name "Athena!" upon hearing the hoot of an owl, avoid stepping on gravestones or visiting women about to give birth, and kneel to pour oil on smooth stones at crossroads to avert their power may come as a surprise to the modern reader.41 That he or she might stick pins in dolls fashioned from wood, clay, wax, or lead to place curses or erotic spells on rivals, legal adversaries, or love targets may be more surprising still.42 Perikles, an avowed rationalist, was not beyond tying a charmed amulet around his neck when he fell ill with the deadly plague.43 Riveting accounts of Athenians engaged in love magic, the casting of spells, the inscribing of curses, and the consulting of oracles, dream interpreters, and bird--omen readers (remaining ever vigilant for signs that might portend the future) bring us closer to the experience of actual lives lived. Our own separation of the philosophical from the spiritual greatly obscures our comprehension of the Athenians as they were.
Notwithstanding dark practices, the Athenians aspired, above all, to be "the most beautiful and noble," to kalliston, a concept that dominated their worldview. This ideal motivated them toward heightened excellence but, at the same time, reveals a certain unease, an apprehension of the possibility that fortunes can suffer sudden reversals. The conviction that they must be "the best" utterly governed the Athenians' sense of their own being, absolutely and in relation to everyone else. It also profoundly informed their relations to one another.
Engaging with a new paradigm, we aim for a deeper, more authentic realization of the ancient Athenian experience of the monument than we've had for the past two hundred years, seeking an answer not only to the question "What is the Parthenon?" but to the larger one: "Who were the Athenians?" That question's answer has also been rendered obscure and reductive by the effort of subsequent peoples to seize the ancient mantle. Above all else, the Parthenon—-the epicenter of an urgent and spiritually charged civic life—-is the key to how Athenian identity was shaped and sustained.
At the same time, the Parthenon was first and foremost a religious building, a temple among temples. Its status as a masterpiece of Western art has long discouraged questions that have been asked of other temples built in places and at times that we know less well than those of Periklean Athens. In this book, I examine the Parthenon in relationship to sacred buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere throughout the Greek world. I focus on foundation and genealogical succession myths that define local identity and on the signs and symbols that communicate a common origin for the Athenian citizenry. I look at local heroes and gods, at the relationship between their tombs and temples, and at the rituals that built bridges between the two. Such monuments enabled citizens to come into direct contact with their ancestors, reminding them of the values upon which their communities were founded. For a culture without media, without a sacred text, the centrality of a great architectural work in forging this solidarity cannot be overstated. For the Athenians, the Parthenon was a very special nexus in which sacrifice, ritual, memory, and, yes, democracy were closely intertwined.
We shall begin with the natural environment of the Acropolis, its cosmology, and the myth tradition that so shaped Athenian consciousness. We'll consider the ways in which local myth grew out of local landscape, examining the inseparability of the Parthenon from its natural surroundings, memory structures, and belief systems that derive from its unique setting. We'll go on to track the transformation of the Acropolis from Mycenaean citadel to sanctuary of Athena, focusing on the shrines and temples that preceded the Parthenon and the cosmic myth narratives of their sculptural decoration. We then turn to the Persian devastation of the Acropolis in 480 b.c. and the comprehensive Periklean rebuilding program that followed some thirty years later. Here, we'll take a close and culminating look at the Parthenon sculptures, above all the frieze, which provides such a critical aperture into the core meaning of the building.
In later chapters, we shall examine the implications of this reading for our understanding of the Athenians themselves, through a better sense of their rituals, festivals, and games and the legacy of the Parthenon and Acropolis cults. Central in this is the relationship of dead heroes and heroines to rites of remembrance at the Panathenaic festival, the preeminent and defining celebration of Athenian identity, when the Athenians were, so to speak, most intensely, consciously, ecstatically Athenian. Finally, we'll consider the Athenians' earliest self--styled imitators, to take an oblique look at the Athenians through the eyes of those who observed them contemporaneously. Though hardly more immune to the sort of distorting reverence that shapes impressions of Athens in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the princes of Hellenistic Pergamon were at least not so separated from their ideal by the alienating effect of two millennia. As we consider the legacy of the Parthenon in the invention of heroic narratives and founding myths at the sanctuary of Athena Polias Nikephoros at Pergamon, we shall endeavor to keep close to the ancient experience, especially to the landscape that shaped local memory and to the narratives of earth, water, and the heavens that dominated local sensibilities. In the evocative words of Christopher Wickham, "Geography, like grace, works through people."44 This is especially true of the Athenians, who were first and foremost a people of sea and land, of trade and agriculture—-in short, of Poseidon and Athena.
But let us start at the beginning, the scene upon which the great, mysterious, and ultimately defining building of the Athenians was created. Then, as now, location was the key to appreciating all real estate, and so let us first explore the Acropolis and its environment.
Meet the Author
JOAN BRETON CONNELLY is a classical archaeologist and the author of two previous books, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece and Votive Sculpture of Hellenistic Cyprus. She received her A.B. in classics from Princeton University and Ph.D. in classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, where she now serves on the board of trustees. In 1996, Professor Connelly was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She received the Archaeological Institute of America's Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and held NYU's Lillian Vernon Chair for Teaching Excellence in 2002–2004. She has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Magdalen College, New College, and Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Connelly has excavated throughout Greece, Kuwait, and Cyprus where she has directed the Yeronisos Island Excavations since 1990. She is currently a professor of classics and art history at New York University.
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Dr. Connelly provides a captivating, comprehensible interpretation of the Parthenon frieze in this book. Her research is fascinating and eloquently presented. A pleasure to read!
Wish i could give it no stars