There is a local coffeeshop/bookstore that calls itself "Paris on the Platte," which because of its stark contrast with the image of the famed French city still provokes snickers even though I haven't visited the place in three years. So having just discovered that Boston is called by some the "Athens of America," needless to say my mental systems of disparagement are in their "target acquired: fire when ready" mode.
Does Boston's moniker refer to the fact that she executes her Socrateses, exiles successful aristocrats, sets up an imperial league to exploit her neighbors and is shamed first by a Spartiate city-state and then an imperial Alexander the Great? Has her populace a particular devotion to the virgin goddess Athena? Where is her Parthenon?
Is Homer taught to every schoolboy and on the lips of every citizen? Are phalanx units trained on the Boston Commons? Do her citizen-soldiers sing martial songs as they march off to war?
Is pederasty widely practiced among her male citizens to help preserve the virginity of her women for the marriage bed?
Do her great geniuses blast democracy as mob rule and the lower classes as willing followers of any demaogue that is not kept in check? Do they laugh at Saint Paul for his assertion that God became flesh? Have they festivials featuring the ritual slaughter of cattle and religious plays about the gods? Who is her Sophocles and Aristophanes?
Are her laws written in poetic form?
For the most part, nope. Boston just has more universities than anybody else. Odd how such a prosaic fact has provoked such a poetic description. Somebody must have really loved that city, once, perhaps "more than his own soul," as Niccolo Machiavelli loved his mother city.
A city known as the "Carthage" or "Sparta" or "Jerusalem of America," that might be interesting. I don't think Rome is a contender, since its glory days lasted far longer than any of the above, and has far too many connotations to confuse even the non-pedantic among us.
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