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The map of Hannibal’s march and life
Join me for a moment in having fun with this map below. It comes to us, via the Wikimedia Commons, from Frank Martini, a cartographer in the Department of History at the United States Military Academy....
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Pyrrhic victories
You’ve heard of Pyrrhic Victories, which are defeats disguised as triumphs–in other words, Kipling-esque impostors of the sort that I will be describing in my book. But do you know why they are called...
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A map of the impostor Success
Above is perhaps the most famous map and chart of all time (via the Wikimedia Commons). It is too small in my post, so please click through to the image. Its French caption begins: Figurative Map of...
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Hannibal’s Y chromosome
Click on this map and read about the latest in this fantastic research effort called the “genographic project“. The dots show the areas of the Mediterranean with the highest frequency of the Phoenician...
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“East” vs “West”: Where it started
Every now and then I amuse myself by taking some notion that seems so familiar that we take it for granted, and tracing it to its origin. Where did it start? So, in today’s episode, let’s look at the...
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The Numidian headbutt
Slight change of pace from our philosophical discussions in recent posts: I just checked my impressively detailed stats in WordPress, and made an intriguing discovery: My all-time top post by far is...
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Mapping the death of newspapers
Have a look at this interactive map of the layoffs at American newspapers. And 2009 is only one month old! Posted in writing Tagged: journalism, Maps, newspapers
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Carthage and Rome: murderous twins
I left off in this thread on the historical background of the main characters in my forthcoming book by asking you to savor a certain sense of mystery: At the beginning of the so-called Hellenistic era...
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It’s all Greek to me
That’s what we say in English when we don’t understand something. (Probably thanks to Shakespeare, who had Casca saying to Cassius in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II, that “it was Greek to me.”) But...
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It was all Greek to them. No, literally.
I left off in my thread on the general historical backdrop to the main story in my forthcoming book with a nod to Hellenism. That is because my main characters, Hannibal (Carthage) and Scipio (Rome),...
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Great friends for 230 years: Carthage and Rome
Are you puzzled by Carthage and Rome? You should be, if you’re learning about them through my thread on the historical backdrop behind the main story and main characters in my forthcoming book. So far,...
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Pyrrhus meets Rome; the world takes note
Let me now start to unravel some of the mysteries I have been setting up in my recent thread about Carthage, Rome and Hellenism–the historical backdrop for the main plot in my coming book. The first...
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Oops, we started a world war
Life, or history, is a tragicomedy. A lot of it is is just plain absurd. Hilarious, if it were not also terrible. The epic is bound up in the banal, the heroic in the vulgar. Wars are started out of...
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Frenemies: Freedom and equality
Marianne, above, did not flash her boobs to all those corpses for nothing. She did it for the trinity (as in the tricolore she carries) of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Let’s leave fraternity, which is...
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The rape of Melos: Thucydides as great thinker
One of the most important dialogues in all of literature, all of history and all of political philosophy (and yes, I am aware that this is a bold statement) is the so-called “Melian dialogue”. Its...
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The Economist’s coequal humo(u)r
From time to time, I like to regale you with tiny anecdotes from our daily routine at The Economist, especially when they display our quirky side. For instance, an editor might remark, as she...
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On English (and other dialects of Sanskrit)
I mentioned en passant in the previous post that the Sanskrit word vira, hero, is related to the Latin vir, man, and thus to our virtue and virility. And, of course, to the Modern Hindi vir, brave....
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Trojan/Roman Aeneas: the historical big picture
What was Virgil trying to accomplish in writing his Aeneid, perhaps the greatest poem in history? That’s the question I want to try to answer in this post. (Since the Aeneid merits several posts, I’ll...
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The wrong heroine: Joan of Arc
What does Joan of Arc — Jeanne d’Arc in French — say about our notions of heroism? I’ve been pondering this for a while. So far in this thread on heroism, all the heroes have been male (and...
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How Muhammad created Europe
Historians are still arguing about why and how (and even when) the Roman Empire fell — and by extension why, how and when the “Middle Ages” and “Europe” (ie, northwestern Europe as we understand it)...
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Justice: by truth or victory?
Which sort of judicial system, generally speaking, is more likely to lead to justice? One that: looks for the truth, or lets two sides fight it out to see who wins? You might think that I’m setting up...
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They can’t stop writing about Hannibal
It has been 2,200 years, and yet we can’t stop thinking about, and writing about, that man. My book — about our own lives as seen through Hannibal’s — is essentially ready (but still awaiting a...
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The vapors of Delphi
When the ancient Greeks and Romans had a question of great import, they traveled to the navel (omphalos) of the world, which they believed to be at Delphi, on the steep slopes of Mount Parnassus in...
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Minard’s map of Hannibal’s crossing
As you know, I love maps, especially historical maps, and I like to play with them to make points. For instance, in this post, I turned a map of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy upside down to illustrate...
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Hannibal’s lifetime path: the map
Look at this beautiful map. It depicts the dramatically simplified life path that Hannibal probably took. And you’ll find it in the beginning of my book. The mapmaker and copyright owner is David...
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The EU & the Holy Roman Empire
In our double issue for the Christmas holidays, I’ve once again let my hair down and indulged myself with a cheeky but (hopefully) not silly historical comparison. This time: The Holy Roman Empire:...
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