On April 28, 2022, the news service NewsNation published a story about the commercial use of artificial intelligence to “recreate” the deceased on a virtual level, and permit people to have “conversations” with these electronic reanimations.
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The Roman lawyer and government official Pliny the Younger wrote a fascinating letter to the historian Cornelius Tacitus that has fortunately been preserved for posterity (Letters I.20). The topic discussed is whether it is better to deliver a long speech, or a short one. Pliny says he has often debated this subject with a learned friend who believes conciseness in public speech is the best policy.
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The emperor Julius Valerius Maiorianus, known to English-speaking posterity as Majorian, was a vigorous and able sovereign. He is conceded to have been one of the last western Roman leaders who made an energetic effort to maintain and improve the empire’s institutions. Even Gibbon, who usually had only snide comments for the later occupants of the Roman throne, condescended to say a good word for him in chapter 36 of his History.
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There are many men who lack a certain sense of awe and grandeur at the inscrutable workings of Nature. They are apt to favor crank theories instead of considered judgments; and they recline in negativity and pessimism when the time comes for them to perform in the face of adversity. They lack faith in the ability of the human soul to accomplish truly great things, because they themselves have no awareness of the capacities of that divine soul.
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The Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who lived from 1879 to 1962, changed his birth name when he was in college. He was originally known as William Stephenson, and was born in Manitoba, Canada. His biographers do not know exactly what prompted him to make such a startling reinvention of identity.
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The name Jacob August Riis is an obscure one today, known only perhaps to scholars of American journalism and photography. He was a Danish-American journalist, and he lived from 1849 to May 26, 1914. He produced excellent work in his day; his photographs of the New York slums were influential in helping promote social reforms that eased the lives of the urban poor. His 1890 volume How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among The Tenements Of New York constitutes an important record of the squalid conditions of the Gilded Age’s downtrodden.
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The philosopher Philo of Alexandria, in the second book of his treatise On Dreams (II.18.123), relates a story about a despotic governor of Egypt. “It is only a very short time ago,” he says, “that I knew a man of very high rank, one who was prefect and governor of Egypt, who, after he had taken it in his head to change our national institutions and customs…was compelling us to obey him, and to do other things contrary to our established custom.”
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The war between Julius Caesar and Pompey engulfed the Roman world between 49 and 48 B.C. Historians, seeking concision and brevity at the expense of accuracy, call it a “civil war”; and in one sense it is. But to those who lived through it, or fell under the long shadow of its aftershocks, it was more than a civil war. It was with good reason that the poet Lucan, in the first line of his Pharsalia, described the conflict as something “worse than civil”:
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By 331 B.C. Alexander the Great had reached Egypt and brought it under his control. He already had a string of incredible military victories to his credit, including those at Granicus, Issus, and Tyre. He must have sensed, in the marrow of his bones, that he possessed some indefinable quality that separated him from other men.
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In his treatise On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero points out a shameful personal weakness of the philosopher Epicurus. What was this character flaw? It was Epicurus’s congenital inability to admit that he had ever been influenced by the thinkers that preceded him. Cicero states:
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Quintus Curtius 
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