1460 Córdoba (Spain), Religion: Moses Maimonides published the ‘Mishneh Torah’ codifying Jewish law. We came to Córdoba. (You either get it or you don’t.) We snapped this statue of the great scholar.
1743 London, Music: Georg Handel’s ‘Messiah’ premiered. Kate and Julie have sung this more than once.
1839 Kinderhook (NY), Language: ‘OK’ entered the vernacular. But by 1839 it appeared in print in the ‘Boston Morning Post.’ One story is that incumbent President Martin van Buren’s supporter formed OK Clubs, where OK stood for his home – Old Kinderhook). Members of OK Clubs took the name seriously and attacked supporters of van Buren’s rivals with clubs. There are alternative explanations of the term, but even so, the wiley Van Buren would have made of use of ‘OK.’
1857 Boston, Food: Fannie Farmer published a cookbook with explicit measures carefully stipulated, e.g., a level tablespoon, or 1 ounce. No more dashes, handfuls, or pitches. Likewise the instructions were stir for ten minutes, no more stir until tired or mix until ready. It remains in print to this day.
2001 Nadi (Fiji), Space: Viewed from Fiji, after orbiting for fifteen years, the Russian space station Mir plunged into the water in a controlled re-entry. Those parts that survived re-entry fell into the South Pacific Ocean at 40° South and 160° West. The Russians did a better job of this re-entry than NASA did with SkyLab which fell on West Australian, with the result we have a fragment framed on the wall from Kate’s parents property in Esperance.
22 March
1765 London, Politics: Parliament passed the Stamp Act to pay for the last war with France. It levied taxes on every transaction in the American colonies from buying a newspaper, a cigar, a bolt of cloth, to a bank loan. It was the latest in a series of taxes to pay off war debts. Because it was so ubiquitous this tax became a proximate cause of the American revolution. The stamp tax on property sales remains one of the main sources of income of Australian state governments, that and gambling taxes.
1784 Bangkok, Thailand, Religion: The Emerald Buddha was moved to a temple on the grounds of the Royal Palace. It is two feet high and shows a seated Buddha. Records refer to it in 1434 but its exact origins are unknown.
1897 Sydney, Politics: Edmund Barton hosted the first conference of the six colonies of Australia to discuss a single constitution for the whole. Pictured below is his notebook with comments on the 1891 draft Federal Constitution.
1960 Murray Hill (NJ), Science: The first patent for a laser was granted to Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes of Bell Labs. Earlier patents had failed because they lacked practical details. Some say they copied the idea from Gort. Having had laser surgery, I am grateful to one and all.
1972 DC, Politics: The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress and went to the states for ratification. ERA guaranteed rights to women as first proposed in 1923. Hawaii was the first state to ratify. A backlash followed and the amendment failed ratification by 3/4ths of the states.
21 March
1800 Pavia (Italy), Science: Count Alessandro Volta described the discovery of an electric battery in a letter to the Royal Society of London. It was addressed to the president of Society, Joseph Banks.
1804 Paris, Law: After four years of development the Civil Code Napoléon was promulgated to embody the rights of the French Revolution. It was coherent, simple, rational, and clear. The French legal profession has yet to recover. It remains in force in France, Louisiana, and Quebec, and elsewhere i the Francophone world.
1852 Boston: Literature. Harriet Stowe published Uncle’s Tom Cabin. It was the best seller of the age and became a beacon for the abolition movement. It has been described as the match that lit the slow burning fuse of the Civil War.
1985 Vancouver, Sports: Canadian Rick Hansen left on a fundraising trip around the world in his wheelchair. It took two years, traversing thirty-four countries and raising $C 26 million for disability charities. Hansen was a three-time gold medal Paralympian.
2228 Riverside (IA), Science Fiction: James Tiberius Kirk will be born to command the starship Enterprise.
20 March
1930 Corbin (KY), Food: Harland Sanders opened the first Kentucky Fried Chicken store. It was an adjunct to a motel he owned and operated. It soon become more profitable and easier to run than the motel. I ate some KFC once when a penurious graduate student and that was enough to last my lifetime.
1934 Fort Myers (FL), Sports: For the Philadelphia Athletics Babe Didrikson pitched one inning in a spring training exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, after hitting the lead-off man, she retired the side in order. Mildred ‘Babe’ Didrikson was a versatile athlete who won 82 golf tournaments and every Olympic event she was permitted to enter. Despite her prowess, or because of it, the Professional Golfers Association refused to let her compete with men, though she repeatedly applied to do so. She inspired the film ‘Pat and Mike’ (1952) and appeared in it in a cameo as herself.
1942 Terowie (South Australia), History: This rail head is one hundred and fifty miles north of Adelaide, it was the change of gauge junction for the railway north to Alice Springs, west to Kalgoorlie and east to Broken Hill. Each line had a different gauge so trains of one gauge would pull up on one side of a platform and goods and luggage were manhandled across to a waiting train on a different gauge track on the other side of the platform. Passenger were awoken to do the same. In 1942 after having refused to obey several earlier Presidential orders to leave Corregidor, it was here, while changing trains as described above, that General Douglas MacArthur said to the waiting press about the Phillipines: ‘I shall return.’ A biography of this caesar is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking. Terowie is now derelict.
1977 Paris, Politics: For the first time more than a century Paris had a mayor. The post was created as a sinecure, and intended to be purely ceremonial. In it Jacques Chirac saw an opportunity and he campaigned for it and was elected. His many enemies, rivals, and opponents congratulated themselves on seeing him sidelined in this meaningless job. They started re-postioning themselves to fill the void he left, they thought. Ah uh. He used the publicity of the position to prepare for higher office rather than as a pension to the surprise and irritation of many.
1985 Nome (AK), Sports: Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod trail sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome. She outpaced the man who finished second by several hours. She and the thirteen dogs had taken eighteen days to travel through a sub-zero blizzard. The dogs often wore boots and goggles. The trail is 1,112 miles long over mountains, across glaciers, along cliffs; it was once a mail route. Her example stimulated other members of the weaker sex to enter this race and the next three races were also won by women. If the PGA ran this race, women would have been banned.
19 March
1882 Barcelona, Architecture: The first stone of the Sagrada Familia cathedral was laid. It is said today that in another twenty years it might be finished, or so we were told in 2018. It is an astonishing building and the story of Antonio Gaudi is even more compelling. Been there, seen that. We thought we were cathedraled-out until we got here. It is breathtaking in and out and like nothing else I have ever seen.
1931 Carson City, Politics: Nevada legalised gambling in a bid to overcome the Depression. In the next year it legislated the easiest divorce laws in the United States to add divorce-tourism to gambling-tourism. Now as then gambling taxes are the bulk of the state’s income. It also got gangster-tourism in 1959 when organised crime left Havana and found a new headquarters.
1932 Sydney, Transportation: The ribbon was cut to open the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Francis Edward de Groot put in an appearance. Later the Governor-General dismissed the elected premier of New South Wales for defaulting on repayments on loans to British banks to build the Bridge in the Great Depression. Was there any connection between the two events? Speculation on this subject has been the subject of many works of fact and fiction and some in which they authors make no such distinction. Been over that bridge many a time.
1966 College Park (MD), Sports: An unheralded Texas Western University basketball team defeated Adolph Rupp’s University of Kentucky dynasty in the NCAA national championship game. It was a 10:1 upset win for the Miners from Texas Western. Miner Coach Don Haskins violated the unwritten rule and started five black players against Rupp’s all-white aristocrats of the Blue Grass. Rupp had never had a black player on his many teams and intended to keep it that way. (See ‘Glory Road’ (2006) for an entertaining interpretation of this game.) At that time no college, no professional team had ever started an all black line up, regardless of ability or context, in any sport, still less in a nationally televised championship game before a sold-out lily white audience in a gymnasium in the south. Haskins knew the unwritten rule, but he wanted his team to win and after discussion with all the players (because they — black and white — would bear the brunt of the reaction) he put his best five on the floor, and they won 72 – 65. The Kentucky team included future NBA stars Pat Riley, Louie Dampier, and Larry Conely. None of the Miners made it to the NBA.
1991 Tempe (AZ), Sports: When Arizona refused to recognise Martin Luther King Day, National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue terminated an agreement to hold the 1993 Super Bowl in Phoenix and moved it to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Arizona Senator John McClain had campaigned for a referendum to accept MLK day but not even his prestige prevailed. The reaction in Arizona was one of outraged innocence while Phoenix lost an estimated $100 million in revenue. What do NFL Commissioners do these days?
18 March
1325 Mexico, History: The legendary date for the foundation of the Aztec capital on the island in Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. The entirety of the Valley is now Mexico City. Been there and been overwhelmed.
1852 New York City, Finance: Henry Wells and William Fargo incorporated a shipping company that in time became a bank. They were inspired by the opportunities of the 1849 California Gold Strike. Wells Fargo shipped gold but also began to store it for clients and issue notes for it. Then it began trading the notes. It became much storied because it travelled far and wide. I have had two account with WF, one a long time ago in California, and another more recently in Nebraska.
1931 Montreal, Techology: Jacob Schick sold the first electric razors providing millions of men with the excuse of a shave. He spent ten years in the army and hated cold water shaving. His solution was to shave without water. Users have not had a close shave since but many skin rashes from pressing hard. Still it was an advance compared to the lethal straight razor of the day. And it offered dry shaving which was convenient for use in the car when battery powered versions appeared.
1959 Honolulu, Politics: In far Washington with the stroke of a pen President Dwight Eisenhower made Hawaii the fiftieth state. The back story is that Ike was reluctant make Alaska a state because he saw it as front line with the Soviet Union and wanted Federal powers there to be unfettered. But Alaska and Hawaii had made common cause in agitating for statehood, and Congress would not vote for one and not the other. After many consultations, he conceded the point with his usual good humour. Been to Hawaii many times, so many that we have lost count, and plan to go again in May.
1965 Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov exited the spacecraft Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. He is the first of our kind to float in space. Leonov worked in the Soviet space program for many years, training others after his own flying days ended. Below is a selfie he took. A review of a super Soviet film about Salyut 7 is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Robert Harris, ‘Cicero Trilogy: Imperium (2006), Lustrum (2009), and Dictator (2015).’
Genre: fiction, biography
GoodReads meta-data is, in the order listed above, 496, 452, and 544 pages, totalling 1,492 pages, the trilogy as a whole is rated 4.6 by 308 litizens. Each of the separate titles has an entry on GoodReads, as well, with a separate rating for detail hunters.
Verdict: Robert Harris is a genius at such historical fiction.
‘What nation has ever erected a statue to a man because he was rich?’ Sorry Clive Palmer but there it is.
‘A home without books is a body without a soul.’
For reasons only known to the high priests of publishing, the separate novels have different titles in the USA and UK editions to confuse librarians, readers, and buyers. Beware.
The three titles of this trilogy offer the reader an eye witness to the long fallout of the Roman Republic as experienced by Tiro, slave to Cicero. The author’s premise is that long after the events, Tiro wrote down what he saw and heard, making use of the extensive notes he had taken along the way, as well as his prodigious memory. The result is a biography of Cicero in all but name. Well, I read it that way.
Tiro was Cicero’s confidential secretary and they were seldom apart in waking hours for forty years. Cicero had a mania for detail and wherever he went, Tiro was there to take notes of everything said by Cicero and others. These notes were possible because Tiro had devised a shorthand notation that allowed him to keep pace with even the most garrulous speakers. Tiro is credited with the ampersand ‘&’, the abbreviations etc, NB, i.e., e.g., and much more. Xenophon had some primitive version of shorthand nearly four centuries earlier but none of it survives. He used it for notes on his campaigns.
Tiro’s written records were a novelty and it often gave Cicero an edge against his numerous opponents, rivals, and fellow travellers. Tiro’s perspective allows the author some distance from the subject, while making clear Cicero’s towering achievements, his errors, foibles, and lapses are there to see.
Cicero was a wordsmith and much of the novel takes the form of dialogue and even speeches, yet it is so well judged that it does not seem wordy, nor does the pace slow, despite the verbiage.
Other intellectuals like Thomas More, Niccòlo Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Max Weber, all had political careers, but none of theirs was anything like Cicero’s. A country bumpkin, he rose steadily with ambition and ability in the Roman Republic. HIs rise is the more remarkable for his disinterest in the sword and his lack of money, normally the keys to success. What he had in plenty was words with which he often found a high ground unseen by others quick to the sword or awash in money.
His legions were his words, and by them he rose and survived, often against the odds, and occasionally cut down his enemies. If he finally lost to the sword at sixty-two he mused that having lost the past and the present, his words might still win the future: the judgement of history. In that he was right. We know him, his words, and his fame but those of few of his many enemies.
He also became a household name then and now, sort of. Great oratory, like great poetry or music, is a distillation of emotion into an exact form. But to convince other he himself had to be convinced, and part of the story here is how he convinced himself of this course or action and that, sometimes in contradiction to one to the other.
He was neither a demagogue nor a patrician, but at times allied with each. At times one faction used him and at other times he used that faction. He steered toward the best interest of Roman, and that chiefly was stability without civil war and with civic freedom. His incessant search for a compromise brings to mind another orator, Henry Clay. In his flexility in trimming to steer to the distant shore of peace he likewise brings to mind another Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln. Cicero had few principles but he had a goal that determined his method.
Seeking stability meant making strange bedfellows, and changing them from time to time. Patronage, when he had it, was used to divide and confuse enemies, not to reward friends, and later that tactic cost him friends.
He lacked the consistency so loved by the simple-minded of journalism. The straight line is seldom the shortest way between the here-and-now and peace in the world of politics.
He revelled in the political world: ‘Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base?’ Hmm, well most major sports now fit that bill but….
The best analogy for statesmanship in Cicero’s opinion is ‘navigation – now you use the oars and now you sail, now you run before a wind and now you tack into it, now you catch a tide and now you ride it out. ‘Just as the purpose of a pilot is to ensure a smooth passage for his ship, and of a doctor to make his patient healthy, so the statesman’s objective must be the happiness of his country. One merely adapts to circumstances as they arise.’ Navigating politics takes years of skill and study, not some manual written by a deep thinker.
Into the mix of the Roman Republic came a lightning bolt named Julies Caesar wearing the mask of a wastrel while scheming for an even bigger prize than Cicero ever imagined. And the rest is history….
Cicero succeeded beyond his wildest dreams but his cursus honorum to success left many discarded allies, out-distanced rivals, and bred in the bone enemies, and with success Cicero changed, became complacent, over confident, and even, surprisingly for this restless man, lazy. Meanwhile, his enemies accumulated. In semi-retirement he was no longer a player but he was a symbol that those enemies, some of them patricians and others plebeians, could use to arouse followers, the discarded allies and the beaten rivals.
Then the final rupture came and he came back into a no-win situation where this wily old fox was outwitted by a gangling teenager called Octavian.
Among the vast cast of characters there is the anti-Cicero, namely Cato, who lived like a pauper, despite his great wealth, and embodied his uncompromising Stoic philosophy. When he learned that Caesar would arrive the next day he did as he advised others to do: he bathed, dined, read philosophy, and then fell on his sword to commit suicide. N.B. Cato did not bathe often and seldom ate more a few olives.
The history is well known and Harris takes some liberties with it to make a coherent story seen from Tiro’s point of view by occasionally back-filling. In lesser hands these occasions would have seemed intrusive and didactic but not so here. There is also some fiction in this work of fiction.
A patient reader finds many rewards in the descriptions of the time and place, and in Cicero’s insights into the world of Roman politics. Here is a sample of Cicero’s perspective on Roman democracy, such as it was. ‘You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election — an election is a living thing – you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is – with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted.’ And that living zoological aspect of elections is what Cicero found so fascinating. He added that elections in the end were ’perhaps one of the things that killed the republic: it gorged itself to death on votes.’
Or consider his remarks on history: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’
Those readers who know these Romans and these times through Shakespeare and the many derivations from the Bard, will find a harder and darker reality in these pages. Shakespeare, too, took liberties for his purposes, because he was not writing history. That is fine, the problem is some naive readers take it that way, as the same naive viewers take a film like ‘Dunkirk’ (2016) to be history when it certainly is not.
It is one of ironies of fate that most of Cicero’s many books are lost, destroyed in the debacle of the fall of the Roman Republic and then the divisions and destruction of the Roman Empire. While Plato’s works, five hundred years earlier, survived, having been widely disseminated before the collapse of the Greek world.
I have never managed to read more than a few pages of Cicero. I found him a high context writer and I did not have the context. I have looking for the copies I have on the shelf, and maybe…. My favourite Roman from this period is Decius Caecillus Metellus the Younger, who does not appear in Harris’s pages, but in the pages of the escapists series of krimis by John Maddox Roberts.
17 March
0492 Saul (Ireland), Religion: St Patrick’s Day marks his death on this day, according to legend. The first St Patrick’s Day parade was held in New York City by soldiers of an Irish regiment in the British army in 1765. We saw the green river once in Chicago.
1521 Manila, History: Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines in a worldwide search for envelopes.
1845 A Bristol man, baker Henry Jones, patented self-raising flour. Its success within a year led to his appointment as purveyor to Queen Victoria. He had developed it as an alternative to the hardtack issued to British sailors, and spent years trying to convince the Admiralty to try it. Only when Florence Nightingale took up the cause did the Admiralty relent, and fresh bread became available on Royal Navy Ships.
1901 Paris, Art: After his death seventy paintings by Vincent Van Gogh were exhibited and caused a sensation with their electric energy. His brother Theo had organised the display. A few examples of his work had been exhibited before in the Salon des Independents, but had hardly been noticed. Noticed they were this time. We saw a splendid and informative display of a few of his paintings in Chicago a time ago.
1960 Paris, Cinema: ‘À bout de souffle’ (‘Breathless’) directed by Jean-Luc Godard opened. The title refers to the final moments of the last scene.* It was the first of the Nouvelle Vague films and caused a sensation with its attractive nihilism. The dean of more reviewers Roger Ebert included it in his “Great Movies” list in 2003, writing that, “No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential,” calling revolutionary its “headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.” The film itself is obsessed with films and contains references to ‘Forty Guns,’ ‘Pushover,’ ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’, ‘Whirlpool,’ ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ ‘Maltese Falcon,’ ‘The Glass Key,’ and ‘The Harder They Fall.’ In its turn it has influenced innumerable subsequent movies.
*Belmando last line has driven cinemistas into frenzies of interpretation since. The translations are many and all I have seen miss the point, something that must have amused Godard since he was sure all critics were idiots. Jean-Paul Belmondo comments on the absurdity of life at the end, not on Jean Seaberg’s betrayal. That was to be expected. That’s my take on it.
16 March
1850 Boston, Literature: National Hawthorne published ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ In the popular culture this powerful foray in social criticism has been reduced to a soap opera. One of my students wrote a superb thesis on it.
1861 Austin, Politics: Founder of Texas Governor Sam Houston refused to acknowledge the secession of Texas and was impeached. Upstairs in the Hall the firebrands voted to leave the Union in a wild scene, while downstairs Governor Houston sat reading Cicero. When presented with the bill, he refused to sign it. Back upstairs ran the democratically elected mob which ousted him for a more compliant alternative. A biography of Houston is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1867 Glasgow, Medicine: Quaker Joseph Lister published a manual on antiseptic surgery in ‘The Lancet.’ He became a surgeon though his medical education was limited by prejudice and barriers against godless Quakers. His innovations were widely disparaged by other surgeons. But the survival rate of patients led to a demand his services. This demand led other surgeons to apply his methods. Thank you Dr Lister.
1900 Heraklion (Crete), History: Arthur Evans found the bronze age city of Knossos, home of the legendary Minotaur. Discoveries there re-wrote much of ancient history in Linear B. It remains Europe’s oldest city tracing back to 7000 BC.
1926 Auburn (MA), Technology: Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket. Its flight of a few seconds reached 40 feet. Inspired by H.G. Wells stories Goddard had been experimenting with rockets for years using gunpowder. This flight was made while he was a PhD student at Clark University. At times the Smithsonian funded his research into methods to reach the stars. One of the rocket facilities at the Johnson Space Center in Houston is named for him which we saw a few years ago.
15 March – The Ides.
44 Julius Caesar was assassinated. There is a discussion of Cicero in a book review elsewhere on this blog.
1778 Vancouver, History: Captain James Cook sailed into Nootka Sound and charted Vancouver Island. To confuse matters the city of Vancouver is not on the island of that name. Victoria, the provincial capital, is on the island, while Rain City Vancouver is on the mainland. Been to Vancouver many times.
1877 Melbourne, Sports: The first international cricket match in Australia was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground against England. In those days the MCG was a paddock and not the temple of indulgence it is now.
1907 Helsinki, Politics: Finland legislated the vote for women, the first place in Europe to do so. The women below were all elected to parliament in that year. At the time Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia, and the parliament was strictly advisory, but nonetheless it was a parliament and there were elections with universal suffrage. We enjoyed a few busy days in Helsinki in 2016. A biography of the Greatest Finn, Karl Mannerheim, is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1985 Boston, Technology: Symbolics Computer Corporation registered the first ever domain name: symbols.com. There are a billion roman names now registered and an active market in trading them. Went through the computer museum in Boston about that time.
