Author: Quintus Curtius

Age Of Spectacle: Chariot Races, The Hippodrome, And The Four Factions

Quintus Curtius History , ,

To understand fully the social environment in which the eastern Roman empire operated, we must have some grasp of the unique culture surrounding Constantinople’s Hippodrome in the centuries that followed the disappearance of the Roman empire in the west.  In Byzantium, sport and politics achieved a strange admixture that has no exact historical parallel anywhere else; sport influenced politics, and politics guided sport.  It was a peculiar world, but one that makes sense once we understand the conditions that existed at the time.  We begin with the arena itself.

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The Fragility And Perishability Of Knowledge (Podcast)

Quintus Curtius Podcast , ,

In this podcast we discuss how fragile and perishable knowledge can be. We comment on the loss of Latin literature in the West, and the dissipation of the holdings of the Alexandrian library of the Ptolemies. It is clear that even a short period of neglect can result in the loss of a catastrophic quantity of irreplaceable knowledge. Every generation must safeguard, respect, and promote the legacy of the past, so that future epochs are not deprived of their cultural inheritance.  It only took about 200 years of neglect for the majority of Latin literature to become lost to history.  In the east, the great library of Alexandria, along with that of Pergamum, withered away from a combination of apathy, neglect, and the vicissitudes of time.  What lessons can be learned from these sobering facts?

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Preserving Something For Time To Make Better

Quintus Curtius Thought , , ,

Before I explore the main subject of this essay, I wanted to relate a tale about Alexander the Great’s leadership acumen.  The historian Arrian relates an event that he believes best distills Alexander’s genius for command.  It can be found in VI.26 of his History of Alexander.  When Alexander and his army were passing through the Gedrosian desert (a part of what is now Baluchistan), they ran low on water and began to be tormented by extreme thirst.  Water was almost nowhere to be found, and it would be some time before they could reach a reliable aquifer.

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Movie Roundup (1/20/2019)

Quintus Curtius Film , , ,

All right.  Here are some of the latest.  We review Glass (2019), What Still Remains (2018), Barbara (2012), and Goldstone (2016).

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Friedrich Schlegel, The Sanskrit Language, And The Beginnings Of Comparative Philology

Quintus Curtius Language, Literature , , ,

The great antiquity and depth of Indian civilization had been known to Europe and the Middle East for many centuries; yet the precise contours of Indian advances in mathematics, literature, and philosophy were hidden behind the veils of preconception and confusion.  We know that the caliph Harun Al-Rashid, in Baghdad in the 9th century A.D., commissioned translations of some prominent works of Indian literature, but such knowledge remained in the hands of scholars and was not widely diffused.  Things began to change gradually with the advancement in geographic, scientific, and commercial knowledge in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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Antonio De Ulloa’s Explorations In South America

Quintus Curtius Travel & Exploration , , ,

Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giral may have been Spain’s greatest explorer of the eighteenth century.  The hardships he endured certainly merit his inclusion on any list of that century’s great cultivators of geographic knowledge.  He was born in Seville on January 12, 1716; and like many accomplished travelers, he received a thorough education in the traditional disciplines.  He came from a family with a naval tradition, and young Antonio was eager to follow in these footsteps.

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Treachery Ensnares Some, But Is Defeated By Others

Quintus Curtius Literature , , ,

Every man who goes about his business must be attuned to the realities of his surroundings.  He should not close his eyes to what lies within his field of vision; and he must not delude himself by rationalizing the treacherous intentions of others.  The prudent man will not see plots and conspiracies everywhere, for this is the mentality of a craven fool; but he will still maintain a healthy alertness and awareness of his environment.  Such a policy might have saved the life of the camel in the tale that follows, as we will see.

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A Reading From “Pantheon”: Ice Odyssey: Douglas Mawson’s Race Against Death

Quintus Curtius Podcast , ,

In this podcast, I read a chapter from my 2015 book Pantheon. The chapter is entitled “Ice Odyssey: Douglas Mawson’s Race Against Death.”  It is good for us to be reminded of stories like this.

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Georg Wilhelm Freytag’s Latin Compendium Of Arabic Proverbs

Quintus Curtius Language , ,

About a year ago one of the readers here at Fortress of the Mind informed me of a work of scholarship that he thought might be of interest.  The work was Georg Wilhelm Freytag’s monumental Latin treatise Arabum Proverbia (literally Proverbs of the Arabs, but better rendered as Arabic Proverbs), a three-volume collection of classical Arabic proverbs drawn from the Compendium of Proverbs (مجمع الامثال) of the medieval philologist Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Maydani (احمد ابن محمد الميداني).  I was able to locate this impressive yet forgotten work, and have found much pleasure in poring over its pages.

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