It’s Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon:

Though Greek in language, the civilization of Mycenaean Greece was in most other, basic respects a provincial outpost of a Middle Eastern culture whose epicentres lay in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The imposing Lion Gate entrance to the citadel recalls Hattusas of the Hittites or even Babylon; and the beehive, corbelled, drystone tombs known as the Treasury of Atreus (Agamemnon’s father) and the Tomb of Aegisthus (lover of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra) betray an almost Egyptian lust for imposing posthumous longevity. 

Palace-frescoes suggest that the buildings rang to the chants of court-musicians, and so, conceivably, there may have been Mycenaean court-poets or at any rate court-lyricists. But the Linear B texts deciphered thus far at least (from Thebes, Tiryns, Ayios Vasilios, and Pylus as well as Mycenae on the mainland, and from Cnossos and Khania, ancient Cydonia, on Crete) contain not a shred of poetry nor any other kind of literature, and, given their documentary, bureaucratic function as temporary records of economic data mainly for tax-purposes, are hardly likely to yield such in the future. 

(It is, not incidentally, by accident not design that the Linear B tablets were preserved: the fires that consumed the palaces at Mycenae and elsewhere in c. 1200 BCE baked them to an imperishable hardness).

In short, Mycenaean culture and society represented, in Hellenic retrospect, a false start. 

Wyatt Mason on outdoor springtime reading Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition): “Not least of the pleasures of reading outside is one of the most prosaic: the light’s really good.”

Der Spiegel:

“We noticed that American products and the American way of eating are trendy at the moment,” Judith Witting, sales manager for Sprehe, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Americans are more relaxed. Not like us stiff Germans, like (Chancellor Angela) Merkel.”

The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word “fingers” in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. “It’s like hotdogs,” Witting said. “No one would ever think they are actually from dogs.”

For Americans in Germany, though, there is a risk that the product might be seen as racially insensitive. Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US — naming strips of fried chicken after the first black president could cause some furrowing of brows.

Witting told SPIEGEL ONLINE the connection never even occurred to her. “It was supposed to be an homage to the American lifestyle and the new US president,” she said.