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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Thought
When The Sleeper Wakes
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.
Continue readingThe Millennium Challenge Of 2002
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.
Continue readingFew Are Those Who Follow The Man, But Many Are Those Who Follow His Fortune
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.
Continue readingWho Frontinus Was, Why He Is Important, And Why You Should Read Him
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.
Continue readingBaklushin’s Story
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.
Continue readingThe Tyranny Of Time
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.
Continue readingThe Life Of This One, Is As The Death Of That One
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.
Continue readingDo Not Buy At Such A Price, Only To Regret It
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.
Continue readingWithout Good Leadership, Valor Is Wasted
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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Quintus Curtius 
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