If you enjoy this, perhaps you will also like Marcus Aurelius, Sports Broadcaster.
On the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906:
Concerning the great earthquake, I was not able to gain any information from philosophers or scientists, nor could I gain any satisfactory explanation from the inhabitants of the city, who could explain neither why the great city had toppled nor why it had burned.
Some academicians, wishing to seem clever, have attempted to explain the motions of the earth in this place in the following way. They posit that all the earth is comprised of great plates of rock, like the ridges on a turtle’s back, and these float together on a sea of molten earth, and sometimes bump into one another like boats at anchor in the harbor, and that these jolts produce great perturbations of the earth. This is of course is absurd, for if the earth were so composed, then what is the turtle eating?
I will therefore proceed to explain what I think is the reason for the periodic quaking of the earth in these parts. The city of San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean, and this ocean is cold in every part of the year, and the sun is unknown there. Now, when the waters of the ocean are cold it is necessary that the great fish that inhabit these waters would remain slumbering because of the action of the cold water on their blood. But should the sun pass too close to the water due to an unusual wind, it stands to reason that the great fish would wake up from their long slumbers, become enraged and thrash their tails, disturbing the natural course of the tides in this place. These tidal waves, in turn, would thrust themselves against the unprotected shores, resulting in exactly the type of earthquake that so devastated this unfortunate city.
On the Death of Rasputin, 1916:
In the old days, the people of Russia declared that they would overthrow the Romanovs, whom they called despots, and install a government of the people. The Romanovs in those days were greatly influenced by a priest and scholar called Grigori Rasputin and so during the February Revolution the Russian people conspired to murder him by means of poison. When poison failed to kill him, they attempted first to shoot him, then to beat him to death. At last he was wrapped in a curtain, still alive, and thrown off a bridge into the Malaya Nevka River, where he at last ceased to breathe. But there are others who say Rasputin survived these tortures by secretly drinking a mixture of ginger ale and pigeon’s blood, and that he roused himself from the river bottom and fled Russia together with his son, who was a lion.
On the Stock Market Crash 1929:
As things are at present, the leaders of nations would do well to remember the story of the great market crash and the misfortune that followed, for the wise will declare that immoderate greed is the cause of all evil things.
On the Assassination of Trotsky, 1940:
Trotsky and Stalin were also in conflict over their position on the Republic of China which had been established that year in the east. Stalin hoped that Chinese Communist Party would unite with the Kuomintang to bring about a class revolution, but Trotsky was critical of Soviet support for the right-wing Kuomintang. Stalin and Trotsky also disagreed over the pace of industrialization and economic reform. In the winter of that year, Trotsky rode a dolphin to Mexico.
On the Moon Landing, 1969:
For on the moon the sand is made up of very large diamonds, which are polished by the actions of the atmosphere, and are naturally made smooth and perfect. And among these diamonds live a type of dogs, which are similar in size to a baby elephant, and which are very ferocious. And these dogs have the head of a cat, and the body of a boar, and the tail of a peacock, with hooves like a goat, and a moose’s antlers, and a zebra’s stripes, and a call like a chimpanzee, and no part of them in any way resembles a dog at all. And these dogs, as I have chosen to call them, fill their cheek pouches with smooth moon diamonds and hold them in their mouths to quench their thirst and in place of drinking water, for the water on the moon is noxious. And the astro-men who conquered the moon were wary of them, for these moon dogs are the most territorial and aggressive of all the animals on the moon.
On the Watergate Scandal, 1972:
Following the release of the audio tapes, Nixon immediately committed suicide by sitting cross-legged on a river bank, which everyone knows to be fatal.
On the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989:
It is the custom of the Germans to build massive concrete walls to commemorate important feast days, and to decorate these walls with pictures and inscriptions in brightly colored paint, and to set guards and towers and barbed wire and trenches along the walls to decorate them. The Berlin Wall was the greatest of these feast walls. The wall was four hundred feet tall and eighteen feet wide, and at the base was a moat twenty feet wide and filled with water and oil that was kept perpetually boiling by means of a sieve. I know this for a fact, I have seen it with my own eyes when I traveled to Berlin, which I did, personally, and on more than one occasion.
On the Establishment of the World Wide Web, 1990:
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee constructed a giant net of woven fibers and cast it over the earth, from which the “web” gets its name.
Tags: blessed are the greek, herodotus, history, stirring rhetoric, summer block
Related Posts
This Week In Illuminated Manuscripts
Why This Column Is Called “Archival Mix” Now: On Women’s History
Watching Downton Abbey With An Historian: Part Two
Girl on Wire: Thoughts on Tightrope Walking
Watching Downton Abbey With an Historian: Why Watch At All?
Watching Downton Abbey With An Historian: Social Ills
I fucking love this.
These seem like reasonable conclusions.
This is my new favorite thing on the internet. Soooo many hearts!
Accurate.
Oh. My. God.
I contend that Herodotus is right about all these things.
And I want a pet moon dog.
Torn between ardently requesting a daily news digest after this fashion, and wondering how much of this rhetorical technique I can get away with incorporating into routine work emails.
This was AMAZING.
Even more AMAZING: how many people here have read Herodotus.
If you like this sort of thing, and also read Greek: http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/singleV…
This is awesome.
I was just thinking the other day that I should never have switched my major from Classical Studies to English. Classics would have been equally useless, but way cooler. For certain values of “cool,” anyway.
I AM PLEASED.
To the north of the United States of America live the Canadians, a largely peaceful people who had formerly dwelt across the sea in those parts of the world known as France and England. To the east of the Canadians live the Cyclopes, a race of one-eyed giants of the lineage of Poseidon. The Canadian CN Tower, which consists of very prodigious blocks of stone, was built by the labor of Cyclopes captured by the Canadians in battle.
The most valuable advice I gleaned from Herodotus was his account of the (Persian?) custom of reconsidering all decisions made while drunk when sober and reconsidering all decisions made while sober when drunk. This protocol has protected me from many a poor life choice and I highly recommend it.
That was the best part of Herodotus until I read this. Now I will never rest until I have found Trotsky’s dolphin and learned to ride it.
Trotsky’s dolphin, Hero of the Fourth International, died bravely attempting to lead a Political Revolution in the Deformed Workers’ State of Hungary in 1956.
NOOOOOOOOO my life no longer has meaning. Hang on, must get drunk to determine whether or not this is true. (re my life, not re the dolphin.)
I am going to adopt this strategy, nothing can possibly go wrong now.
YOU LAUGH BUT IT’S TRUE THE ANCIENTS KNEW EVERYTHING
I would happily read much more of this.
This fills me with joy. Will Thucydides produce a much better-researched history of the 21st century?
Better researched, but quietly very very angry.
And also in loglan.
Totally off-topic, but I would love a Phillip Stubbes analysis of anything contemporary.
Y’all should read Ryszjard Kapuscinski’s ‘Travels with Heroditus’. It”s a great introduction to KP’s career as a travel writer when he was getting sent all over the world but all he spoke was Polish and the only book he had was that one.
History majors often have to read him too, believe it or not.
Brilliant, the moon dogs was a moment of pure inspiration! Please do something on the 2008 credit crunch!
Ah, even my “inner translation voice” came out when reading this. (I’m a classicist by profession–whee, grad school!) Herodotus reads EXACTLY like this. Now how do I convince my professor to assign these passages for Greek prose composition? Καὶ ἐν τοῖς λιθοὶς ὁ γένος τῶν κυνῶν ζῇ… (from the moon landing bit, time to get back to work!)
Should be το γένος, no? And Herodotus has λίθοισι for the dative plural (see 1.186).
Some of the best internet I've seen in a while.