Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick is entitled “The Lee Shore.” It offers some philosophical commentary on the need for travel and direct experience. Melville reflects on the restless, roaming nature of a sailor named Bulkington:
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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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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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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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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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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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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 Frontinus. He lived from about A.D. 31 to about 104. Here I intend to explain who he was, what is found in his book Stratagems, and why his work is so important.
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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 published in 1860.
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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 on the forearm to show exactly how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds each person has remaining on his balance of life.
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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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Quintus Curtius 
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