I’m going to take a break today from reading and posting. Well, except for this post, which will ramble about my first (remembered) introduction to Thucydides. I was an impressionable third-grader when my parents decided to go see “Patton”. For some reason, they decided to take me. The theater was so crowded we had to sit apart and I soaked in the movie. I caught the references to Thucydides when Patton tells of his plan to invade Sicily as well as Patton falling asleep while reading The Peloponnesian War. While I always wanted to read the work, my first “push” came from seeing that movie. Unfortunately it took me forty years to get around to it.

Now that I think about it, a reference to “Patton” earned me one of my few visits to the principal’s office. Six years after seeing the movie, during a class read-along on Shakespeare, I was reading the part of Brutus. I had fashioned something to look like a scroll using two pencils and a piece of paper. Instead of reading the lines at one point I waved my “scroll” and exclaimed, “Caesar, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” Why I thought I wouldn’t get in trouble escapes me now. Probably then, too.