Vachel Lindsay is an American original. He tramped his way through middle America selling his pamphlet, “Rhymes for Bread”. He was quite mad and killed himself for love of Sarah Teasdale. His son lived on Johns Island, SC, and I knew VL’s granddaughter in college.
Herodotus give his account of the resentments of Miletus against the Persians and the story of the Ionian Revolt, which is the beginning of open warfare between the Greeks and Persians
Stephen and Dr. Fleming begin their discussion of Patrick McGoohan’s television series “The Prisoner.”
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.
How many times have you read a movement Conservative’s explanation of political correctness and critical theory as the products of Marxism?
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.
