Zaatar, as the gentle reader may recall from his travels, is a blend of herbs and seeds popular for centuries throughout the Middle East. Sprinkle it on toasted flatbread with a spray of olive oil and, even if you aren’t wearing a checkerboard towel round your head, a delicious breakfast awaits you
I set this conundrum once before, in another forum over which our founder was then presiding. It bears being repeated, however, all the more so as it is to do with the intertwining of friendship and family ties which has been my subject here of late. But permit me to start from a little farther afield.
In “1984,” Emmanuel Goldstein is the Enemy of the State necessary to bring cohesion to the totalitarian regime. The Two Minutes Hate directs society’s rage against the exiled traitor. Goldstein now is aiding Oceania’s current enemy – Eastasia or Eurasia, depending on the day – with whom we always have been at war.
Book III gets down to the business of Cambyses, Cyrus’ successor, and the invasion of Egypt in which he displays signs of madness, which might just be interpreted as the indications of the tyrannical character that is created when boys are raised without anyone who can say, “NO!”
This is a first sketch. If you read nothing else, you must read the Boethius text. If you have questions or comments, you this post and subsequent posts on the same subject.
Herodotus’ theme, as I observed in the first installment, is the conflict between Europe and Asia or, more properly, Greeks and barbarians. (In a day or two, we shall have a podcast on what barbarians are.) In a way, his work can be treated as a kind of essay in definition, that is, he is defining Greekness or Hellenism partly by describing Greek behavior and partly by the contrast, often merely suggested, with barbarians.
This seems a good time to republish revised version of an essay from the book Peace in the Promised Land, published in 2005. I am by no means an expert on most of the periods discussed, but I have tried to grapple with the sources and with modern scholarship.
