Fear -- and the Ukrainian War   Prologue   Thucydides says that fear sparked the Peloponnesian War. Fear was behind Sparta’s attack on Athens.    In the 50 years or so after the Persian wars, 479-431 BCE, Sparta watched the rise of Athenian power with grave concern – and fear. This was the main reason for the breakout of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE.   The united forces of Sparta and Athens, and their Greek allies, defeated the vast armies and navies of the Persian Empire in early fifth century BCE.   At the end of the Persian wars and the expelling of the Persians from Greece, Athens, and Sparta parted ways. Sparta remained the Greek superpower in Peloponnesos. It refused, however, to join Athens in protecting Hellas, Greek poleis (city-states) spread all over the Mediterranean, from the Persians.   Athens founded the Delian League in Apollo’s sacred island of Delos in the Aegean and close to the Ionian coast dotted by Greek poleis. The Per...

Astronomy and the Trojan War: Solar eclipse over Ithaca, October 30, 1207 BCE, Odysseus killing the suitors (right). Painting by Evi Sarantea. Courtesy Evi Sarantea.   I read Homer in High School. And slowly, in my college classes in ancient, medieval, and modern Greek history, I realized Homer’s epic poems were at the very core of Hellenic civilization.    The more I read the Greek tragic poets and historians of the fifth century BCE, the larger the icon of Homer became in my mind.   Homer in antiquity   According to the second century philosopher, Athenaios, Aischylos said that the stories of Homer became a banquet for the Greeks ( Deipnosophistai  8.347d), a source of wonderful stories, and a ceaseless fountain of inspiration and pride from which philosophers, scientists, dramatic poets, rhetoricians, military strategists, and men of ideas borrowed for the creation and enrichment of Greek literature and civilization.    The Greeks also sang the...

  The US EPA remains in deep crisis. The industry wants a pliant agency or no agency at all. I worked for the EPA from 1979 to 2004.  I wrote Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (with Mckay Jenkisn, Bloomsbury Press, 2014).  I am adding a link to a YouTube video of a recent conversation about EPA:    https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fGmZlwKaOJ4

  Marble column showing an uprooted woman in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Greeks uprooted from Asia Minor. Park in Nikaia, near Piraeus, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.   100-meter sprint   In 1960, I was a high school junior in Argostoli, Cephalonia, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea between Greece and Italy. In addition to my regular classes in science and humanities, I was also learning English. I had decided that, at the end of my senior year, I would leave Cephalonia and Greece for the United States for a college education.   My years in high school, 1956-1961, were the happiest in my life. I was thoroughly innocent of the dangers of the raging Cold War, though I had vague memories of the Greek Civil War, 1946-1949, from stories I heard.     I was an outstanding student. I excelled in athletics as well, especially in 100-meter sprint. My boyfriends were also athletes. We trained together and often, when the weather was nice, we walke...

  I was delighted that a Greek journalist, Achilleas Rodites, interviewed me about the reasons I wrote my book on the history of the Antikythera Mechanism, essentially studying how and why the ancient Greeks created this computer of genius 2,200 years ago. I spent about ten years in this book, starting with mythology, then philosophy, then science and, finally, politics, so I could understand the Greeks and their science and civilization.  I concluded the following: that the Greeks had a dream of a unified Cosmos made up of the sky and Earth working together in harmony and beauty. Pythagoras captured that dream beautifully. Add to that the science and vision of Aristotle passed on to Alexander the Great and the dream becomes real. Aristotle advised Alexander to unify Greece, which he did, then to conquer Persia because Persia, in the fourth century BCE, threatened freedom and democracy in Greece. Alexander defeated superior Persian armies and turned that vast empire into a Gre...

Giant tree uprooted by the menacing wind of climate chaos, January 22, 2022, Claremont, California. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.     It was the beginning of Saturday, January 22, 2022. The angry and loud wind woke me up at about 1:00 AM. It was pitched dark. I looked outside in the darkness and saw nothing. The wind, its menacing sound and fury, overwhelmed my immediate environment and the natural world.    Menacing wind   The fierce wind whistled its warning for several hours. It kept me alert and very concerned about the safety of my family, house, and community.   When the Sun sent its rays of light in the morning over Claremont, California, the reality was not pretty. As a neighbor said to me, Claremont was “a war zone.” Dozens of old giant trees stood uprooted and sprawled in the streets, with a few touching the walls or roofs of homes.   The rumors I heard about the wind suggested the wind attacked a large swath of southern California at speeds ...

Temple of Zeus near the village Machairas in Central Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.   Modern Greece is a couple of centuries old. Miraculously, in the 1820s, the Greeks joined forces and fought a heroic, determined, and successful war of liberation against the abominable tyranny of the Turks.    Monarchical beginnings   Greece became independent in 1928. Ioannes Kapodistrias, former minister of foreign affairs of Russia, and a patriotic Greek with exceptional political talent, governed Greece from 1828 to 1831, when assassins murdered him.   Since that national tragedy in 1831, Greece has been in a perpetual upheaval, primarily because of debt and dependence on foreign powers.    The antidemocratic kingdoms of Europe (England. Russia, and France) saddled tiny Greece, that had barely emerged from about 400 years of foreign oppression, with a German king. Monarchy guaranteed a free hand in corrupting Greek politicians to do their bidding.  ...