Costa Rica the Republic of Costa Rica, is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Ecuador to the south of Cocos Island. It has a population of around 5 million in a land area of 51,060 square kilometers. An estimated 333,980 people live in the capital and largest city, San José, with around 2 million people in the surrounding metropolitan area; the sovereign state is a unitary presidential constitutional republic. It is known for its long-standing and stable democracy, for its educated workforce, most of whom speak English; the country spends 6.9% of its budget on education, compared to a global average of 4.4%. Its economy, once dependent on agriculture, has diversified to include sectors such as finance, corporate services for foreign companies and ecotourism. Many foreign manufacturing and services companies operate in Costa Rica's Free Trade Zones where they benefit from investment and tax incentives.

Costa Rica was sparsely inhabited by indigenous peoples before coming under Spanish rule in the 16th century. It remained a peripheral colony of the empire until independence as part of the First Mexican Empire, followed by membership in the United Provinces of Central America, from which it formally declared independence in 1847. Following the brief Costa Rican Civil War in 1948, it permanently abolished its army in 1949, becoming one of only a few sovereign nations without a standing army; the country has performed favorably in the Human Development Index, placing 63rd in the world as of 2017, among the highest of any Latin American nation. It has been cited by the United Nations Development Programme as having attained much higher human development than other countries at the same income levels, with a better record on human development and inequality than the median of the region. Costa Rica has progressive environmental policies, it is the only country to meet all five UNDP criteria established to measure environmental sustainability.

It was ranked 42nd in the world, third in the Americas, in the 2016 Environmental Performance Index, was twice ranked the best performing country in the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index, which measures environmental sustainability, was identified by the NEF as the greenest country in the world in 2009. Costa Rica plans to become a carbon-neutral country by 2021. By 2019, 99.62% of its electricity was generated from green sources hydro, wind and solar. Historians have classified the indigenous people of Costa Rica as belonging to the Intermediate Area, where the peripheries of the Mesoamerican and Andean native cultures overlapped. More pre-Columbian Costa Rica has been described as part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area. Stone tools, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Costa Rica, are associated with the arrival of various groups of hunter-gatherers about 10,000 to 7,000 years BCE in the Turrialba Valley; the presence of Clovis culture type spearheads and arrows from South America opens the possibility that, in this area, two different cultures coexisted.

Agriculture became evident in the populations. They grew tubers and roots. For the first and second millennia BCE there were settled farming communities; these were small and scattered, although the timing of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the main livelihood in the territory is still unknown. The earliest use of pottery appears around 2,000 to 3,000 BCE. Shards of pots, cylindrical vases, platters and other forms of vases decorated with grooves and some modelled after animals have been found; the impact of indigenous peoples on modern Costa Rican culture has been small compared to other nations, since the country lacked a strong native civilization to begin with. Most of the native population was absorbed into the Spanish-speaking colonial society through inter-marriage, except for some small remnants, the most significant of which are the Bribri and Boruca tribes who still inhabit the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, in the southeastern part of Costa Rica, near the frontier with Panama.

The name la costa rica, meaning "rich coast" in the Spanish language, was in some accounts first applied by Christopher Columbus, who sailed to the eastern shores of Costa Rica during his final voyage in 1502, reported vast quantities of gold jewelry worn by natives. The name may have come from conquistador Gil González Dávila, who landed on the west coast in 1522, encountered natives, obtained some of their gold, sometimes by violent theft and sometimes as gifts from local leaders. During most of the colonial period, Costa Rica was the southernmost province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, nominally part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In practice, the captaincy general was a autonomous entity within the Spanish Empire. Costa Rica's distance from the capital of the captaincy in Guatemala, its legal prohibition under Spanish law from trade with its southern neighbor Panama part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, lack of resources such as gold and silver, made Costa Rica into a poor and sparsely-inhabited region within the Spanish Empire.

Costa Rica was described as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America" by a Spanish governor in 1719. Another important factor behind Costa Rica's poverty was the lack of a significant indigenous population available for encomienda, which meant

Post-captain is an obsolete alternative form of the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. The term served to distinguish those who were captains by rank from: Officers in command of a naval vessel, who were addressed as captain regardless of rank. In the Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries, an officer might be promoted from commander to captain, but not have a command; until the officer obtained a command, he was "on half-pay. An officer "took post" or was "made post"; this was a rated vessel – that is, a ship too important to be commanded by a mere commander – but was an unrated one. Once a captain was given a command, his name was "posted" in The London Gazette. Being "made post" is portrayed as the most crucial event in an officer's career in both Forester's Horatio Hornblower series and O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. Once an officer was promoted to post-captain, further promotion was by seniority. A junior post-captain would command a frigate or a comparable ship, while more senior post-captains would command larger ships.

An exception to this rule was that a junior post-captain could be posted to command an admiral's flagship, always a large ship of the line. The admiral would do this to keep his most junior captain under close observation and subject to his direct supervision. Captains commanding an admiral's flagship were called "flag captains". One example of this is the appointment of Alexander Hood to the command of HMS Barfleur, flagship of his brother, Admiral Sir Samuel Hood. Sometimes, a high-ranking admiral would have two post-captains on his flagship; the junior would serve as the flag captain and retain responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the vessel. The senior would be the fleet captain, or "captain of the fleet", would serve as the admiral's chief-of-staff; these two captains would be listed in the ship's roll as the "second captain" and "first captain", respectively. After 1795, when they were first introduced on Royal Navy uniforms, the number and position of epaulettes distinguished between commanders and post-captains of various seniorities.

A commander wore a single epaulette on the left shoulder. A post-captain with less than three years seniority wore a single epaulette on the right shoulder, a post-captain with three or more years seniority wore an epaulette on each shoulder. In the O'Brian series, Aubrey "wets the swab" – that is, he celebrates his promotion to commander and the acquisition of his "swab" or epaulette with the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. Note that the term was descriptive only: no-one was styled "Post-Captain John Smith". Rating system of the Royal Navy Post-ship National Maritime Museum Uniform Collection

Hipparete was the daughter of Hipponicus III, a wealthy Athenian. She was married c. 424 BC or earlier to general Alcibiades. According to Plutarch, however criticized for using "implausible or unreliable stories" in order to construct Alcibiades' portrait, Alcibiades "gave a box on the ear to Hipponicus, whose birth and wealth made him a person of great influence." This action received much disapproval, since it was "unprovoked by any passion of quarrel between them". To smooth the incident over, Alcibiades went to Hipponicus's house and, after stripping naked, "desired him to scourge and chastise him as he pleased". Hipponicus not only pardoned him but bestowed upon him the hand of his daughter. According to another version of the story, according to Plutarch, is that it was not Hipponicus, but Callias, his son, who gave Hipparete to Alcibiades, with a dowry of ten talents. "when she became a mother, Alcibiades exacted another ten talents besides, on the plea that this was the agreement, should children be born.

And Callias was so afraid of the scheming of Alcibiades to get his wealth, that he made public proffer to the people of his property and house in case it should befall him to die without lineal heirs."According to Plutarch, Hipparete loved her husband, but she once attempted to divorce him, because Alcibiades consorted with courtesans. According to Plutarch, on her appearing publicly to support her plea for divorce to the magistrate, as the law required, "Alcibiades came up and seized her and carried her off home with him through the market place, no man daring to oppose him or take her from him", she lived with him until her death and gave birth to two children, a daughter and a son named Alcibiades. Smith, William.