Free Republic

The dominant literary culture of the late 20th century loved to tear down the heroes of the past, focusing almost entirely on their flaws while belittling the virtues, beliefs, and deeds that made them worthy of admiration in the first place. I have written about this annoying tendency previously on several occasions, including here and here. In our own time, we are afflicted with a slightly different problem: cultural arbiters who know almost nothing about the great men and women who went before them, save the cherry-picked anecdotes that magically seem to support their political cause of the moment. It...

The Scriptural recounting in the Gospel of Saint Matthew of the mysterious wise men who visited the baby Jesus bearing gifts is one of the most enduring and compelling scenes in Sacred Scripture. The rudimentary nature of St. Matthew’s description of the Magi’s arrival has encouraged a flowering of apocryphal literature across the centuries which has added depth and detail to the occasion of the Epiphany. There are numerous references to the Magi in early post-Scriptural literature. Saint Justin Martyr mentions them prominently in his debate with Trypho (Chapter 78) in the mid-second century AD. Magi were of the priestly...

Saint Sebastian is one of the great ancient martyrs of the Roman Catholic Church as well as one of the saints most frequently depicted in artwork down through the centuries. The image of Sebastian tied to a stake, his body riddled with arrows, is one of the most immediately recognizable and jarring images of the ancient martyrs. As with many of the martyrs from the days prior to Constantine, his story has become somewhat muddled. He is mentioned in a homily of Saint Ambrose (On Psalm 118) as having come from Milan. Most of the rest of his biography comes...

The Roman legions didn’t often know defeat. Military supremacy is what made the Roman Empire one of the most powerful in history. So the thousands of Roman soldiers who lay dying in the German mud of Teutoburg forest in 9 AD must have, beneath the pain of their wounds and the fear of death, felt a keen surprise. Roman legions didn’t often know defeat, and here three of them were utterly annihilated. This was not something a legionary expected to experience in his career.

December 6 is the feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra, later of Bari. Though known more commonly in modern times for his connection with “Santa Claus”, Saint Nicholas was considered a great saint in his day and numerous anecdotes relating to his acts of holiness, courage and generosity have come down to us from antiquity. Here is an excerpt from an anonymous history from the 4th century AD entitled, Praxis de Stratelatis (Act of the Generals). In it, we see Saint Nicholas doing what he does best: using his authority as bishop to rescue the innocent and speak the truth...

“Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that once defined a hierarchy of imagination long ago abandoned by our civilization; of an eleven-century political, religious and cultural struggle that sought to reconcile Christianity and Antiquity, transforming the Western spirit into a brilliant battleground between Latin and Greek, Augustus and Basileus, reason and faith, ancient and modern. Yet to unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind”, as Yeats dreamed...

Image credit: WMG, University of Warwick Researchers at the University of Warwick have identified what is believed to be the earliest known marine navigation tool ever discovered. The artifact, now determined to be an astrolabe, was excavated in 2014 from the wreck of a Portuguese explorer ship which sank during a storm in the Indian Ocean in 1503. The ship was called the Esmeralda, part of a fleet led by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first person to sail directly from Europe to India. The astrolabe is believed to date from between 1495 and 1500, which would make it...

According to a recent international study, the volcano of the island Santorini, Greece, erupted in the 16th century BC and not earlier. The survey characterized a number of research studies that took place in the past and have indicated that Santorini's volcano may have erupted a century earlier, as unreliable because the method based on tree-ring measurements that they used, could not provide them with accurate results. An international team of researchers led by Paolo Cherubini from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has demonstrated in the scientific journal Antiquity, that this method cannot provide...

Pharoah, let my people go: How did ancient Egypt become a land of slaves building fantastic monuments to dictatorial leaders? The land of Egypt was rich and fertile, a seeming paradise for egalitarian living. Stephanie Pappas writes in Live Science about how despots “evolved” in ancient societies, but that’s a misleading use of the term; it actually was a series of bad choices by free people. She writes how Simon Powers at the University of Lausanne came up with a mathematical model to explain the shift from egalitarianism to despotism. Whether it actually explains them could be disputed, but he...

The key to renewed US-Iran relations: an ancient chalice, according to the LA Times. An ancient Persian chalice, hewn from silver and featuring a mythical winged creature, had been seized by US Customs officials in 2003. After sitting for over a decade in a Queens, NY warehouse, diplomats decided to use the anitquity as a bargaining chip for talks - as a gesture of friendship to Iran from the US.

Archeologists made a rare discovery at Tel Motza, to the west of Jerusalem, recently: evidence of the Jewish religious practices and rituals in the early days of the Kingdom of Judah. Among the finds are a ritual building and a cache of sacred vessels some 2,750 years old. Anna Eirikh, Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily and Shua Kisilevitz, the directors of the excavation, released a joint statement provided by the Israeli Antiquities Authority in which they said: “The ritual building at Tel Motza is an unusual and striking find, in light of the fact that there are hardly any remains of ritual...

Rare Ancient Statue Depicts Topless Female Gladiator A small bronze statue dating back nearly 2,000 years may be that of a female gladiator, a victorious one at that, suggests a new study. If confirmed the statue would represent only the second depiction of a woman gladiator known to exist. The gladiator statue shows a topless woman, wearing only a loincloth and a bandage around her left knee. Her hair is long, although neat, and in the air she raises what the researcher, Alfonso Manas of the University of Granada, believes is a sica, a short curved sword used by gladiators....

- And so many Christian ones? The institution of the Nobel Prize is one of the few things that's just as big outside Scandinavia as it is within the old land of the Vikings. (There will probably never be a McLutefisk, I guess..) In similarity with most members of this forum, I don't think people like Al Gore belong in the company of (other Nobel laureates) like Einstein, Fermi, Wałęsa, Hemingway, Marconi, Bohr, and Churchill. The older and wiser I have become, the more I've realized we Europeans often look up to the wrong kind of Americans (- but we...

The smuggling of stolen antiquities from Iraq's rich cultural heritage is helping finance Iraqi extremist groups, says the U.S. investigator who led the initial probe into the looting of Baghdad's National Museum. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos claimed both Sunni insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias are receiving funding from the trafficking. Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney, noted that kidnappings and extortion remain the insurgents' main source of funds. But he said the link between extremist groups and antiquities smuggling in Iraq was "undeniable." "The Taliban are using opium to finance their activities in Afghanistan,"...

A unique exhibition of 2,000-year-old paintings called Pompeian Red has opened at the National Museum of Rome.

My husband and I are expecting fraternal twin boys in March, and we have reached the stage of discussing names. My husband is a small-L libertarian, while I am more conservative, but we agree that we would like to give our sons names to live up to. (For instance, we are seriously looking at Washington, Jefferson and Franklin as middle names, since we like the idea of giving the boys the names of some of our most important and admirable founding fathers.) We are also fans of history, particularly the Roman era, and would be interested in considering names of...

Antiquity unearthed Downtown Lindsay A. Miller / Arizona Daily Star Desert Archaeology crew member Jennifer Sandretto fields a question from Tucson resident John Cushman about the excavation site at a triplex on Court Avenue Downtown. Lying beneath the triplex is a pit house dating back 2,000 years, which predates the Hohokam Indians by centuries. The triplex is destined to become a museum in the Presidio Historic Park, a Rio Nuevo project Downtown. The shallow trenches and holes in the dirt, roped off in the back yard of an old adobe row house Downtown, seem at first like nothing more than...

While browsing through the ancient Persian history, I was struck and fascinated by another subject Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism has not only made a major contribution to the ancient philosophical thought but has also had a deep imprint on the Persian history and culture. Since ages, man has been striving to search for the meaning and purpose of life. Two ancient philosophies threw up answers to this eternal quest. One came out of the Vedic thought of re-incarnation (samsara) which believed in perpetual cycles of life, death and re-birth. It believed that soul (atma) finally got liberated (moksha) based on man's good...

Ownership dispute has been set aside for joint study and digitisation of the world’s oldest bibleAn emotional reunion took place in the vaults of the British Library last month, when the archbishop responsible for St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt was shown the Codex Sinaiticus, the world’s oldest Bible. The manuscript, which had almost certainly been at the desert monastery from the sixth century onwards and possibly from two centuries earlier, was taken to Russia in the 19th century in controversial circumstances. It is so precious that only four scholars have been allowed full access to the...

A team coordinated by Tura Beach archaeologist Dr Judith Cameron has discovered and preserved the oldest complete shroud found in Southeast Asia, dating back some 2,300 years to the Bronze Age Dongson culture. The cloth was found in a wooden boat-shaped coffin covered by thick black mud in a canal in the Red River plains area of Vietnam in December last year. In what has been hailed as a major find, team leader Professor Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University said that the boat coffin - unearthed at Dong Xa, 50km southeast of Hanoi - was possibly also the...