Before finally sitting down to write "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon briefly contemplated a project entitled "The History of the Liberty of the Swiss," as well as a book about an obscure Egyptian pharaoh whose agricultural innovations ultimately led to the invention of geometry. After being banished by Augustus Caesar to a backwater on the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid wrote a eulogy in honor of his nemesis in the language of the barbarians that inhabited the region. Both the eulogy and the language have disappeared. .... Those intrigued by such oddities, or even...