Perhaps one needs to be a writer, or at any rate a storyteller by temperament, a habitual raconteur, to feel it, but for a man of such disposition there is no greater frustration than trying to relate an anecdote to the driver of a car while in the passenger seat
Few details of the story of Exodus have been securely confirmed by archeologists. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that nomadic Hebrews made their way out of Egypt back to southern Canaan, where some of their people appear to have been living already.
Ilhan Omar’s campaign slogan was “Send Her Back”–to Congress, of course. There is no doubt that the Congress of the United States deserves a member as loose in her financial dealings as in her intimate life, but it is not to Washington but to Mogadishu that she should be sent.
The news from my alma mater… Ah, but the gentle reader may not know that as a young man I spent many years in litigation with Yale University, which sought to shut down the literary magazine I edited for publishing poems that rhymed and, more generally, for airing views unsuitable to a modern place of learning.
The Kingdom of Theoderic, the judicial murder of Boethius, Justinian’s reconstruction of the Empire, the coming of the Dark Age and the rise of the Roman Church.
People invent new words to describe new phenomena. Take “quack” as an example. In my schoolboy ignorance I used to think that “quack” was an amusing slang noun derived from the word describing the noise a duck makes. Not at all. It is an earlier seventeenth-century abbreviation of an entirely serious sixteenth-century Dutch word meaning “a pedlar of false cures,” that came into English as “quacksalver.”
Some years ago I knew a lady, gainfully divorced from a Russian oligarch, who turned to me with the plea to find her an honest lawyer in London. This made me privy to the substance of her predicament, which was basically that the fortune she kept in a famously named Swiss bank had been pilfered
The Fourth book is largely taken up with Herodotus’ intriguing account of the Scythians and with Darius’ ill-advised expedition against these strange people. The Scyths were a people of Iranian stock, probably very similar to the Medes and Persians before they entered the Middle East and found themselves subjected to the constraints of civilization. They were nomadic horsemen, fearless warriors, and hard to govern. While Darius claims one reason or another for holding a grudge, it would seem that Herodotus regards the expedition as an instance of megalomania.
A podcast with Stephen Heiner and Thomas Fleming on the Fall of the Western Empire, the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, and the enduring legacy of the Roman Empire.
