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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In this podcast, we discuss the real meaning of a few verses from the poet Horace (Epistles I.18.84-85). The quote is: “When a neighbor’s house burns, neglected fires are in the habit of gaining in strength.” These lines are important, and merit comment. We are all connected, and the evil that happens to one man in one place, can easily be experienced by another man somewhere else.
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August of 2025 will see the publication of Michael Fontaine’s How to Have Willpower: An Ancient Guide To Not Giving In. The volume is a modern translation and interpretation of two classical texts: Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia and Prudentius’s poem Psychomachia. Very roughly speaking, these works discuss how to manage our emotional states and overcome the challenges posed by shame and vices.
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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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We will relate the terrible loss of the ship Kent, which sailed from the Downs on February 19, 1825. As a so-called East Indiaman (a merchant vessel trading with the East Indies), the Kent was bound for Bengal in India, and then China. She was a ship of 1,350 tons, and aboard her were 344 soldiers, 20 officers, 43 women, 66 children, 20 civilian passengers, and a crew of 148 men. The sum of these numbers comes to a total of 641.
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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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In this video we discuss the Colt Night Cobra. Those of you who are revolver enthusiasts may enjoy it.
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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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Quintus Curtius 
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