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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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 that carries the utmost seriousness with regard to the fates of men and nations.
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One of the rules of the nineteenth-century whaling industry was that if a captured whale carcass were lost by its owner, it thereafter became the property of the first ship to recover it. After being killed, a whale had to be secured to the side of the whale ship, or towed with ropes; and it occasionally happened that the prize would become untethered from its owner, and float away upon the open ocean. In those cases, the first hand to plant a harpoon in the carcass could claim it as his own.
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In the 1998 film Fallen, one of the characters intones an ominous motto: “What goes around, really goes around.” This is a more emphatic version of the old adage, “What comes around, goes around.” In both cases the meaning is the same: he who spreads iniquity and evil, will eventually be himself visited by iniquities and evils of even greater magnitude.
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It is tempting to believe that our current social problems are uniquely modern, and that they have no analogues to conditions of previous ages. A review of the thoughtful writings of the past shows that this belief is far from the truth. Consider, for example, this comment from the Latin dialogue Antonius, which was composed by the humanist Giovanni Pontano around 1487 and first printed in 1491:
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There is a line in Statius’s Thebiad (VIII.320) which reads,
Omne homini natale solum.
This means, “All soil is native to man.” I think it is appropriate to interpret soil in an abstract form, and understand it as signifying land. He does not mean just any land, but terra incognita: the vast expense of the unknown, untamed and hostile. Does this line have any significance, or is it just another poetic garland? To me the poet is trying to communicate the idea that, for the brave man, every piece of ground on this earth may be claimed as his own, and called his own; and that, through his discipline and efforts, the man of virtue may conquer the challenges of his environment, wherever the locale may be.
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The defilement of a nation’s cultural heritage is among the most odious of crimes. But the offense is especially noxious, and finally unforgivable, when committed by national leaders for their own personal aggrandizement. The past is always vulnerable to the malicious exigencies of the present. An illustrative example is found in the pages of Roman history.
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Quintus Curtius 
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