Category: Fleming

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.

The United States were in origin a confederation of American republics, ruled for the most part by their own constitutions and laws and whose member states were bound in a contract of union with very strict limits.  Between 1776 and 1860, the complex and republican system was devolving–by a sort of political entropy–into a simpler system that concentrated more and more power at the top.

What Franklin and the others knew is that a republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must be engaged in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as original sin. 

The older  textbook view of our history (whose most idiotic version goes by the name “American Exceptionalism”)  is that the American colonists were a rare breed of individualists, cut loose from the traditions of old Europe, who came to New World seeking religious liberty.