He's BACK!

For those of you who were in Mr. Thomas' history class with me in eleventh grade, you might find this amusing.

Alcibiades - History for Kids!

Alcibiades was born in Athens around 450 BC. His mother was an Alcmaeonid. He was from one of the wealthiest families in Athens, and he grew up with the best of everything. After his father was killed in battle, Pericles, another Alcmaeonid, was Alcibiades' guardian. When he was a teenager, during the early years of the Peloponnesian War, he was a student¹ of Socrates.

By the time Alcibiades grew up, Athens was beginning to lose the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades became a very good general. The Sicilian Expedition was his idea.

But when he got in trouble with the Athenians over the question of who smashed the good-luck statues², he ended up running away from Athens to Sparta in the middle of the night.

When Alcibiades got to Sparta, he made a deal with the Spartans. If they would let him stay in Sparta, he would help them win the Peloponnesian War by giving them good advice. They agreed, and the first thing Alcibiades told the Spartans was that they should build a navy and use it to destroy the Sicilian Expedition.

When this plan worked, the Spartans thought Alcibiades was really smart. He also advised them to lay a permanent siege to Athens, instead of only in the summertime. That worked too. But after a while, Alcibiades got into trouble in Sparta, too. People said he had been kissing³ the wife of one of the Spartan kings. He had to leave Sparta quickly.

This time Alcibiades fled to Persia. The Persian satrap (ruler) of Anatolia (modern Turkey) let him stay there, and now Alcibiades gave the Persians good advice about how to manage the Peloponnesian War.

Near the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were so desperate that they let Alcibiades come back as their general. But in the end, they fired him again, and he went back to Persia, where he was killed⁴ in 404 BC, just as the war was ending.

1... and by "student of Socrates" they mean "fucktoy." Talk about Socrates "corrupting the youth"....
2... and by "smashed the good-luck statues" they mean, "castrated various statues of Hermes which consisted solely of 1) a head and 2) an erect penis."
3... and by "kissing" they mean "conceiving illegitimate children with."
4... and by "killed" they mean "shot through by arrows as he was running completely naked from a burning house, after having had sex with his assassins' sister."

THE END.

J. Ro's prediction was correct. Apparently, the Marquis de Sade *did* use tongs. Heated tongs. BUT. Since none of you who read this are in my history class you wouldn't know what I was talking about. Dammity. Aleeeexxxxxx.... get betterrrrr. Yes, history is fun again. It's more Alcibiades type stuff and cones and less 'the grain taxes in 1521' type stuff. Monday! Marie Antoinette's cleavage! Physics is moderately entertaining too. Black holes! I guess it's sort of loserly of me to be talking about school. But really, it's my main... thing. I spend 6 hours a day going there, all my friends are from there, I plan my schedule around it, down to when I eat, I do more homework at night... since I'm getting a free education (you could argue my sanity as the price, but that was Hell Week before winter break, not now), I might as well enjoy it.

I saw 60 minutes about the Lost Boys of Sudan, a bunch of young African men who had their parents killed and were chased out of their homes by the civil war when they were little kids and had to walk through the desert until they got to a refugee camp. Now a lot of them are coming to the States. It makes me wonder what *we* get depressed for. Maybe it's that we figure out that there's more to life than having a safe roof over our heads and three meals a day and a bed. But there's a lot of opportunity here too. We just have to know where to look for it.