One of Poe’s lesser-known stories, The Domain of Arnheim, seems to offer his theory of aesthetics. I say “seems to,” because the dream-like quality of the story leaves the reader with more than a residue of ambiguity.
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More futility than nobility is found in the wars of the emperor Justinian. His capable general Belisarius reconquered Africa and Italy, humbling the strutting pride of the Vandals and Goths; but these fugacious victories only hastened the West’s final ruin.
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Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Sphinx is not one that readers may be immediately familiar with. Despite having been composed in 1850, its lesson resonates powerfully in the age of social media and unrelenting news cycles.
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In 1870 an obscure French army officer and military theorist named Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq died from wounds he received during an engagement of the Franco-Prussian War.
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Last week the new translation of Cicero’s On The Nature Of The Gods was published. It is available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. An audiobook version will come out next month. This podcast explains what the book is about, why it is important, and the special features my translation has. I also read the translation’s Foreword.
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The curious mind may be puzzled by the apparent paucity of commercial and cultural contacts between the Roman and Chinese empires. That these two mighty states seem to have had such meager intercourse with each other, for so many centuries, is one of the oddities of antique history.
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Quintus Curtius 
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