【推荐1】New research into a little-known text written in ancient Greek shows that “stressed poetry”, the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already in use in the 2nd century CE, 300 years earlier than previously thought. It has been found sculpted on twenty precious stones and as a graffito (雕画) in Cartagena, Spain.

In its shortest version, the nameless four-line poem reads “They say what they like; let them say it; I dont care.” Other versions extend with “Go on, love me; it does you good.” The poem, unparalleled (绝无仅有的) so far in the classical world, consists of lines of 4 syllables (音节), with a strong accent on the first and a weaker on the third. This allows it to come into the rhythms of numerous pop and rock songs. So it became popular across the eastern Roman Empire and survives.

By comparing all of the known examples for the first time, Cambridges Professor Tim Whitmarsh noticed that the poem used a different form of rhythm to that usually found in ancient Greek poetry. As well as showing signs of the long and short syllables characteristic of traditional “quantitative” poem, this text employed stressed and unstressed syllables. The new study, published in The Cambridge Classical Journal, also suggests that this poem could represent a “missing link” between the lost world of ancient Mediterranean oral poetry and song, and the more modern forms that we know today. A lot of popular poetry in ancient Greek takes a similar form to traditional high poetics. This poem, on the other hand, points to a distinct and rich culture, primarily oral.

【推荐2】Women were less likely than men to support the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They commit far fewer murders. They are less likely to favor strikes. For some scholars, these are grounds for thinking that a world run by women would be more peaceful.

But European history suggests otherwise, according to political scientists Oeindrila Dube and S. P. Harish. They studied how often European rulers went to war between 1480 and 1913, and found that states ruled by queens were 27% more likely to get involved in wars than those ruled by kings.

This was not all the queens’ fault: men, seeing them as soft targets, tended to attack them. Frederick the Great of Prussia once declared: ”No woman should ever be allowed to govern anything.“ Shortly after becoming king, he attacked the newly crowned Archduchess of Austria, Maria Theresa, and seized Silesia province. Despite years of war, she never recovered it.

But perceived weakness is not the whole story. Queens, the researchers found, were more likely to gain new territory. Catherine the Great expanded her empire by some 200,000 square miles. And married queens were more aggressive than single queens or kings, whether single or married.

The authors suggest several reasons for this. First, married queens may have been able to form more military alliances(联盟),making them confident enough to pick fights. Their husbands had often served in the army before they married, and were well placed to strengthen military ties between their homelands and their wives’ states.

Second, unlike most kings, queens often gave their husbands a lot of power,putting them in charge of foreign policy or the economy. During the 1740s, Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis I, reformed the Austrian economy and raised money for the armed forces while his wife ruled much of central Europe. Prince Albert was Queen Victoria’s most trusted adviser, shaping her foreign policy until his death in1861. This division of labor, the authors suggest, freed up time for queens to pursue more aggressive policies.

The modern era, too, has witnessed female leaders in wars: Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, or Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands. The number of countries led by women has more than doubled since 2000, but there is plenty of room for improvement: the current level of 15 represents less than 10 % of the total. A world in which more women took power might be more equal. Whether it would be more peaceful is a different question.