Latest posts
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The Aeneid: Virgil’s Answer to Homer
Virgil began the Aeneid on a commission and died wanting it burned. Both facts matter, and the second is the more honest gloss on the first. Augustus had…
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The Hammer and the Fire: How the Witch Hunts Happened
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere on the order of forty to sixty thousand people in Europe and its colonies were executed for the crime of…
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The Invention of Jesus: From Galilean Preacher to God
Somewhere around the year 30 of the common era, an itinerant Jewish preacher from the Galilean hills was executed by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem,…
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The Invention of Julius Caesar: How a Man Became a Myth
On the Ides of March, 44 BC, a balding fifty-five-year-old Roman politician was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators at the foot of a statue…
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Rome and the Fall: Reading the Histories of the Barbarian Age
Everyone thinks they know what Edward Gibbon said about the fall of Rome. He blamed the Christians. The barbarians at the gate, the soft and praying…
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Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey: The Casting Backlash, the Trailer, and the Only Faithful Adaptation
Nolan’s Odyssey trailer is here and the casting outrage has begun — but they raged at Brad Pitt’s Achilles too. Why the only faithful Odyssey is Homer’s.