Ancient Greece

A lot of viewers will be following the bouncing ball as the NCAA Tournament concludes. But the alternatives include a diverse mix of entertainment and education.* "Prelude to a Championship/NCAA Championship" (8 p.m.-11 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- And then there were two. College basketball's championship game finally arrives, live from the Kingdome in Seattle. CBS.* "Star Trek: Voyager" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WDCA, Channel 20; WNUV, Channel 54) -- Longtime "Trek" fans had no trouble identifying the antecedent of this repeat: the original "Star Trek" episode "Spock's Brain."

The former students of Baltimore's renowned resident painter Grace Hartigan are surely one of the most diverse groups of artists anywhere, each having taken something of their mentor's approach to painting while turning it to their own distinctive purposes. Maura Maguire, whose paintings are on view at Galerie Francoise, is a former Hartigan student whose densely layered images pick up on her teacher's fascination with mythological subjects but treat them in an altogether more figurative style than Hartigan's abstractions.

Gods, who can figure 'em?Just when you think you're finally on their good side, because they gave you and your lovely wife a beautiful baby boy, a ship sails into the harbor with the horrible news that your alliance of city-states is at war and you've been drafted to lead the troops.So, what can a king do except kiss the kid and the missus goodbye, make a quick sheep's-head sacrifice to Athena, the goddess with the great eyes, and set sail for Troy?"I am Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and this is my story," the portentous voice-over says as the ships become tiny specks on the back of mighty Poseidon.

IN GREEK mythology, the gods were engaged in a spirited rivalry with a race of immortal men on Earth when they created woman out of clay and presented her to man. She was a kind of precursor to the Trojan Horse -- not the innocent gift she seemed.She was called Pandora, and she came with a vessel that she was told not to open. But she did. She loosed misery upon the world, and the men were rendered mortal. Only the gift of Hope remained forever inside Pandora's box.This holiday season, give your teen-age daughter the gift of hope.

My Best Shot June Ray Smith, Shrewsbury, Pa. The beaches of Normandy Last summer I was taken with the tranquillity of this sunny beach and its lone, bright yellow umbrella standing in such stark contrast to the scene played out at that very site on June 6, 1944 - Omaha Beach, Normandy, France. A Memorable Place The enduring allure of ancient Greece Steven Speaks SPECIAL TO THE SUN I have never been much for traveling, which probably explains why it took me a full year to decide to leave Baltimore and move to Belgium to pursue a Ph.D.

Latin, the language some people like to say is dead, is alive and well in Donna Speer's classroom.At the pre-kindergarten through sixth-grade school of Grace and St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Mount Vernon, Speer has sixth-graders reciting Latin verb endings in a rap-like rhythm. Then she gets them standing and pumping their arms like cheerleaders as they chant the qualities of Latin nouns.Speer, 39, generates the same enthusiasm in her Greek classes, where she teaches the alphabet and sections of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Mary Renault was a puzzle who wrapped herself in enigma and scarcely peeped out of the closet.Yet from behind those self-imposed barriers she wrote some of the most vital fictionalized descriptions of homosexual love. Her novel "The Charioteer," published in 1953, was one of the very first to deal with one man's love for another, frankly and without the crime-does-not-pay apology previously appended to such books to appease the censor. So faithfully did Renault describe the emotional tightrope male homosexuals had to walk in those days before the sexual revolution that the book became a cultic item for gays, many of whom assumed Renault had to be a male writer's pseudonym.

Chicago. -- I was called by a newspaper reporter to comment on the dumbing-down of America. That is the latest worry cultivated by our worriers-of-the-day. The Oscars won by ''Forrest Gump'' make people fear a rush of dumb-is-good movies, one already begun with ''Dumb and Dumber'' and ''Tommy Boy.''Other evidence is cited to show that we are turning into idiots: polls proving that people cannot recognize famous events; the silly things said by callers on radio talk shows; our alleged shorter attention span; the replacement of print by visual stimuli, and so on.Well, there is always enough dumbness to go around in any collection of human beings.

DURING THE PAST few years, scholar Martin Bernal has accomplished an Olympic feat: He has managed to make the subject of Ancient Greece both popular and controversial.His award-winning history "Black Athena" presents evidence that Greek civilization -- long acknowledged as the foundation of European culture -- owes more to African and Semitic ancestry than to Aryan roots. It claims that the scholarship of the past 150 years has ignored available evidence about the past because of various cultural inhibitions.

Wandering through "Pandora's Box: Women in Classical Greece," contemplating the exhibit's beauty and power, it becomes apparent that one of the show's most vital qualities is invisible -- the heroic effort involved in bringing these pieces together.Curators have every reason to resist lending their art works to other museums. The pieces are irreplaceable and often fragile. The Greeks, who have seen their ancient art spirited away by private collectors and foreign museums, are especially wary because the art is so central to their national and cultural identity.