William H. Prescott was mentioned in the preceding article here, but I felt that he merited a more extended treatment in an article devoted to him alone. He was America’s first great historian, known for his heroic style, and for his ability to fuse a meticulous attention to original sources with a striking narrative power.
The armies of North Korea burst into South Korea in June 1950 and quickly overwhelmed its forces, confining them to a perimeter around the city of Pusan. Douglas MacArthur, in what can only be called a brilliant counterstroke, hit back with an amphibious landing at the city of Inchon.
Pyrrhus was a powerful king who ruled Epirus and Macedon for some years during the Hellenistic period. Plutarch tells a revealing story about him in his Parallel Lives (Life of Epirus, 14).
One of Pyrrhus’s valued advisors was a man named Cineas, who was entrusted on many foreign missions of great sensitivity.
[To read the rest of my article, click here.]
Current news headlines of populations on the move into Europe have drawn attention to a previous era in European history, one in which mass migrations of foreign peoples played a major role. The Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was faced with these very challenges from the movements of Germanic tribes, as well as Avars, Bulgars, and Huns.
As I looked more into the details of this period of history, I was struck with how resilient and stable the Empire’s organization was. There is vast ignorance of this period of history, even (or especially) among Europeans. While it is often portrayed as an age of continuous decline and decadence, this picture is not the whole truth.
The civil and military organization established by Constantine was wise and enduring, and it deserves to be better known. It stands in stark contrast to the ineptitude and feebleness of the heads of state in modern Europe.
This article is technical in nature, and will be of interest to the few, rather than to the majority. Those comprising the latter group may wish to pass on this post, and spare themselves some heaviness of the eyelids.
Plutarch’s lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger can be read as case studies on the contrasting features of moderation and extremism.
The successful, rational leader will know when to compromise and seek settlements; the extremist will not, and thereby brings himself and others to ruin.
We take so much for granted today about printed books. The wisdom of the ages can be captured and preserved for costs that are so low as to almost negligible. Save for the surfeit of information that currently exists, the modern man has no excuse not to be reasonably acquainted with his heritage.
It was not always so. Before the advent of the printing press, books circulated in manuscript form. They had to be copied by hand, and this was laborious and costly. In the ancient world, manuscript books were relatively cheap and plentiful; but papyrus became unavailable from Egypt during the Middle Ages, leaving expensive vellum as the only available medium for “mass” writing.
Readers no doubt are familiar with Jack London. One of the great 20th century American novelists and short-story writers, he is justly famous for his harrowing tales of survival and courage, often set in exotic locales like the Klondike, the South Seas, and the abysses of urban squalor.
He lived a life that was as adventurous as one of the characters in his stories. Before becoming a full-time writer, he had knocked about as a vagrant, an oyster pirate, a seaman, a gold prospector, and most bitterly as an industrial slave-laborer.
I have recently finished reading Simon Murray’s memoir of his life in the French Foreign Legion, which is titled simply Legionnaire: Five Years in the French Foreign Legion. First published in 1978, it was recently reissued in 2006 as a mass market paperback.
Great men make laws, and greater men interpret them.
If a leader wishes to achieve immortality, let him organize, arrange, and codify a body of law for his people. Many of the greatest leaders (Numa Pompilia, Lycurgus, Solon, etc.) have been lawgivers. The monuments of stone have crumbled, but the laws remain.
To codify is to bestow immortality.
Here is a good story of palace intrigue and conspiracy. We turn our attention to late antiquity, to the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.
Amalasuntha (c. 495-535) was the daughter of Ostrogothic King Theoderic the Great. When Theoderic died, his grandson Athalaric nominally became king. But being a child, the real power lay with his mother Amalasuntha, who ruled as regent.
Quintus Curtius 
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