Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, it will be useful to reread Herodotus, particularly the books that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies. For those who are picking it up for the first time, I must warn you that reading Herodotus, the most entertaining of historians, may become a habit.
It’s time to pick another book. I propose either a selection of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls or else Gulliver’s Travels, which I have been intermittently rereading. My wife and I have been working through Herodotus after breakfast and have at last hit Book V, where we can turn from Scythians and Libyans and read about Macedonians and Greeks on the eve of the Ionian Revolt that leads to Darius’ invasion of 490. This week I’ll be welcoming expressions of preference on any of the above.
I have a chronic reluctance to get up before dawn to perch myself in a tree-stand at first light in the middle of deer season, but, as I faced the final week of hunting, my sloth yielded to an insatiable venison-jones which drove me, regardless of moon phase or feeding schedule, temperature or precipitation, to go out early every morning of that final week, shivering in wind and rain, before work hoping for the arrival of a doe into my kill zone.
The first time I personally witnessed cowardice at high levels was upon the occasion of the first edition of The South Was Right being introduced into my high-school library. In 1993 my father and I joined our local Major John Pelham Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Jacksonville, Alabama. It was at a meeting of that camp that I spoke with a man (whose name I cannot recall) who told me he was a past principal of my school. He spoke to me about a new book by a pair of Louisiana twins that was a scholarly and...
Greeks were not squeamish about discussing sexual matters, though their degree of frankness depended upon circumstance and genre: What could be said in a comedy or put on a vase was not the same as the treatment of sex in tragedy or religious sculpture.
At present Lithuania is a tiny Baltic country wedged between Latvia and a small Russian enclave on the Baltic and Poland, with Belorussia on the southeast. There are 2.8 million Lithuanians plus another 200,000 Lithuanian-speakers outside the country, a population about the size of Dallas if the suburbs are included.
A Brief Chronology of later Roman History with a few quotations and citations added as the weeks go by….
The period of the Persian Wars and the aftermath were a period of intense political activity at Athens. In one generation, Athenians had expelled the tyrants, completely reorganized their commonwealth, and beaten back two Persian invasions. Such success was bound to inspire confidence in the Athenian commonwealth, a confidence that would lead first to to the hybris of the Athenian Empire and then to the ruin Athens suffered in the war with Sparta and her allies.
The moment I learned of the existence of Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South, I set about acquiring my own copy. For the book in question deals with an important and fascinating subject which has been mostly “memory-holed” by Catholic pop media which is more interested in celebrating the ostensibly “Catholic” side of Mohatmas Ghandi than in recalling those of our forebears who stood on “the wrong side of history.”
Ted Geisel/Dr. Seuss ia finding what he would have wrongly supposed to be unlikely “conservative” allies, who either defend him on the grounds that the enemy of my enemies is my friend–what we might call the Stalin Complex–
