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Nowhere Is Rome Less Known Than At Rome
In a letter written to Giovanni Colonna in 1337 or 1341—scholars are uncertain of the precise date—Petrarch says as follows:
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The Audiobook Of The New Translation Of Frontinus’s “Stratagems” Is Now Available
Fortress of the Mind Publications is pleased to announce that the audiobook of the new translation of Frontinus’s Stratagems is now available. The link to Amazon Audible can be found here. The book is read by narrator Saethon Williams, whose expert audio renditions have featured in Quintus Curtius’s other translations. Besides Amazon Audible, the audiobook…
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Press Your White Hairs With A Helmet
In book nine of the Aeneid, the Rutulian warrior Numanus Remulus makes a famous declamation, in which he speaks the following lines:
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You Have No Right To Turn Away (Podcast)
In an 1842 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle chastised Emerson, saying, “A man has no right to say to his generation, turning away from it, ‘Be Damned!’ It is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back…
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The Loss Of The “Boston,” Which Was Burned By Lightning
No one should doubt the extraordinarily destructive power of lightning. A dramatic illustration of this power occurred in 1830, when the packet ship Boston was hit by a bolt of lightning in the Atlantic and burned to the waterline, with the loss of one unfortunate passenger.
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The Expedition Of Antoine d’Entrecasteaux
The French naval officer and explorer Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux was born at Aix-en-Provence in 1739. He enlisted in the French Navy in 1754; but he must have shown promise to his superiors, for they granted him an officer’s commission two years later.
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A Bad Omen At Sea Portends Disaster
The following story is found within the pages of an 1840 volume entitled The Book of Shipwrecks and Narratives of Maritime Discoveries and the Most Popular Voyages. The narrator of the tale, as seems to have been the custom in those days when relating first-hand accounts, has omitted some specific details, such as the ship’s…
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The Aftermath Of Battle (Podcast)
In this podcast I describe unforgettable images that have emerged from the aftermaths of certain battles. We discuss Livy’s description of the battlefield after Cannae, a scene in Dante, and an anecdote from the American Civil War.
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A Literary Review Of “Stratagems”
A literary review of the new translation of Stratagems appeared on the Classical Wisdom substack on October 6, 2025. The review is entitled Rome’s Lost Art of War.
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In The Same Meadow (Podcast)
In this podcast we take a quote from Seneca, discuss its meaning, and apply it to some modern life lessons.
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When The Sleeper Wakes
We are told that the word dystopia first entered the lexicon in 1868, when John Stuart Mill used it in a parliamentary speech. The first dystopian novel is somewhat open to debate, but many consider H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, first published in 1895, to be a strong candidate.
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The Millennium Challenge Of 2002
In 2000, the U.S. Congress proposed a detailed joint-service war game that came to be called “Millenium Challenge 2002,” or, in military parlance, MC02. The idea was a sound one. Rapid technological and doctrinal changes in the preceding decades had generated uncertainty about the U.S. military’s ability to respond to a sudden crisis.
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Few Are Those Who Follow The Man, But Many Are Those Who Follow His Fortune
Around 1440, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini composed an interesting dialogue entitled On the Unhappiness of Leaders (De Infelicitate Principum). It is styled on the classical model, in which notable figures debate the relative merits of different propositions.
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Who Frontinus Was, Why He Is Important, And Why You Should Read Him
I once heard someone pose the question, “Why didn’t the Greeks or Romans produce a military theorist like Sun Tzu?” The answer to this question is that they did, in fact, produce a theorist just as profound—arguably more profound—than the great Chinese sage. The problem is that you’ve never heard of him. His name is…
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The New Translation Of Frontinus’s “Stratagems” Is Now Available
Fortress of the Mind Publications is very pleased to announce that Quintus Curtius’s new annotated translation of Frontinus’s Stratagems has been released. It is currently available in paperback and Kindle editions. The hardcover edition will be available very shortly, and the audiobook edition is expected in early November.
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The Story Of Akulka’s Husband (Podcast)
In this podcast we discuss the story of “Akulka’s Husband,” which is found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The House of the Dead. What does the story mean, and what conclusions can be drawn from it?
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When Someone Else Has Control Of Your Work, Problems Inevitably Arise (Podcast)
When you give control of your work to third parties, you must take care that they do not alter, corrupt, or destroy what you have created. We use the story of the development and issuance of the M16 rifle in the U.S. military in the early 1960s as a tragic example.
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Baklushin’s Story
In 1849, the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested for anti-tsarist activities and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted by the tsar at the last instant, and he was instead given a four-year term in a prison camp in Siberia. From this shattering experience came his semi-autobiographical novel The House of the Dead, which was…
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When A Neighbor’s House Burns, Neglected Fires Tend To Gain Strength (Podcast)
In this podcast, we discuss the real meaning of a few verses from the poet Horace (Epistles I.18.84-85). The quote is: “When a neighbor’s house burns, neglected fires are in the habit of gaining in strength.” These lines are important, and merit comment. We are all connected, and the evil that happens to one man…
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How To Have Willpower (Book Review)
August of 2025 will see the publication of Michael Fontaine’s How to Have Willpower: An Ancient Guide To Not Giving In. The volume is a modern translation and interpretation of two classical texts: Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia and Prudentius’s poem Psychomachia. Very roughly speaking, these works discuss how to manage our emotional states and overcome…
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The Tyranny Of Time
The dystopian science fiction film In Time (2011) offers a fascinating and morbid premise. In the future, we are told, time is the ultimate commodity. Everyone is genetically engineered so that the aging process stops at the twenty-fifth year; after this, each person has only one more year of life. A numeric counter is visible…
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The Role Of Chance In Human Affairs: The Loss Of The “Kent”
We will relate the terrible loss of the ship Kent, which sailed from the Downs on February 19, 1825. As a so-called East Indiaman (a merchant vessel trading with the East Indies), the Kent was bound for Bengal in India, and then China. She was a ship of 1,350 tons, and aboard her were 344…
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The Life Of This One, Is As The Death Of That One
The pages of the medieval biographer Ibn Khallikan (II.301) contain the following moral anecdotes related to an obscure poet named Abu Al-Hasan Ibn Bassam (?–A.D. 914), who was known by the surname Al-Bassami.
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Do Not Buy At Such A Price, Only To Regret It
What may at first consideration be an enticing course of action, may take on a much more negative hue after further scrutiny. This was the point of an anecdote related by the Roman writer Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights (I.8). Although the story is essentially a humorous one, the idea it conveys is one…
Original copy of Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) published in Holland in 1642. From the collection of Fortress of the Mind.
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