Category: History

Stomach cancer may be what carried off H. P. Lovecraft. And it may be what Napoleon’s doctor put on his death certificate, but new findings strengthen the case that it wasn’t what carried off French emperor Napoleon.

Poison was.

Specifically, arsenic.

Some time ago, hair samples from Napoleon were found to contain abnormally high traces of arsenic, leading to speculation that he was poisoned.

SOME DISAGREED.

Some of the speculation centered on the idea that the abnormally high levels of arsenic might be due to environmental factors, such as the use of arsenic in certain kinds of wall paper at the time.

But new findings suggest that the arsenic in his hair was absorbed from his bloodstream, indicating frighteningly high serum concentrations of arsenic and thus a deliberate poisoning.

EXCERPTS:

The toxic form of arsenic, used for centuries as rat poison, was found in Napoleon’s hair samples at 37 to 42 times above the normal level in the new study.

"I can’t imagine Napoleon fed himself rat poison, even if he wasn’t a gourmet," joked Damamme of Montreal-based INS.

"The arsenic was in the ‘spinal cord’ of the hair, which implies that it came from the blood and food ingested," he said.

"Somebody in his circle gave him arsenic in small doses to poison him little by little to avoid another violent uprising by those who still supported the emperor in France," Damamme said.

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Now if they just had biological samples from the emperors Augustus and Claudius to verify the poisonings that reportedly did them in.

Remember in hide and seek when the seeker calls "Olly Olly Oxen Free" and all the hiders get to come back?

I thought that the tales of Japanese soldiers holed up in remote Pacific islands long after World War II was over were the stuff of legend. Apparently not.

"Sixty years after the guns of World War II went silent, reports that two Japanese Imperial Army soldiers had been found in the mountains of the southern Philippines sent Japan’s diplomats on a frantic mission Friday to try to contact them.

"The two men, in their 80s, reportedly have lived on the restive southern island of Mindanao since they were separated from their division, staying on for fear they would face court-martial if they returned to Japan."

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The city of Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, has a bit of an image problem that some historians would like to attribute to ancient Roman propaganda: The ancient city of Carthage was accused of infanticide and at least one archaeologist is trying to prove the tradition to be bunk:

"An expert on ancient Carthage — a city obliterated by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago — Mr. [Mhamed Hassine] Fantar is campaigning to clear his forefathers of a nasty stigma: a reputation for infanticide.

"’We didn’t do it,’ says the 69-year-old archaeologist, rejecting accusations that the ancient citizens of this North African land sacrificed babies to appease their gods."

On the other side of the academic divide over the issue, another archaeologist says the revisionist version of Carthage’s history is a "whitewash":

"Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He’s now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn’t expecting to win them over. ‘No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts,’ he says."

GET THE STORY.

Note to archaeologists two thousand years from now who may be arguing over whether Western societies of the twenty-first century committed infanticide to appease their "gods":

It’s true. We really did do it.

JIMMY ADDS: Carthago delenda est!

Today in 1453 Constantinople fell to attacking Muslim forces, ending the Byzantine Empire.

That this happened was a great tragedy and yet another instance of jihad being successfully waged against Christendom.

The tragedy could have been prevented had European Christians worked together, and both western and eastern Christians are responsible for the fact that they didn’t.

The fall of Constantinople also comes as a salutary warning for Europe today, whose demographic trends are dooming them to cultural extinction in the face of Muslim demographic jihad.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not pronounce "Diet of Worms" as it it was a new weight-loss fad involving nematodes. A "diet" is an assembly and "Worms" is a German place-name pronounced with a /v/ sound on the front of the word. "Diet of Vorms" is more how it sounds. Think: Frau Blucher!

Today–May 25, is the anniversary of the Edict of Worms, which was issued in 1521 against Martin Luther and his writings.

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You’ve probably heard of historical revisionism pertaining to the World War II-era, but the kind you’ve probably heard of is the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying revisionism.

That’s not the only kind, though.

Military historian Victor Hansen explains another kind.

EXCERPTS:

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.

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(NOTE: I can’t tell from what he wrote how Hansen regards the immorality of the nuking of Hiroshima or the firebombing of Dresden. The deliberate targeting of civilians, of course, is inconsistent with Catholic moral theology, but whatever Hansen’s views on this point may be, his survey of how WWII is being handled in modern politically correct treatments is informative.)

Oxyrhynchus! It’s not something you use to wash your clothes!

It’s a place in Egypt where, a century ago, a huge load of ancient manuscripts were found. (This tends to happen in Egypt, where the desert climate better preserves documents written on papyrus, which has a nasty tendency to rot in wetter climes.)

A BUNCH OF STUFF WAS DISCOVERED AT OXYRHYNCHUS,

including some fragments of what later turned out to be the Gospel of Thomas (we got the full text from the Nag Hammadi find later on) and the Gospel of the Hebrews–both being apocryphal gospels that are not inspired and do not belong in the New Testament.

This much is common knowledge among folks with a passing familiarity with biblical archaeology.

But what many have been less familiar with is the fact that many of the Oxyrhynchus texts remained unread because they were simply illegible. In fact, 800 boxes of the things remained unread at Oxford.

NOW THEY’RE BEING READ.

A new technique using infra-red has enabled scholars to finally read the documents, and the results thus far have been stunning.

EXCERPTS:

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery

Now, as this story starts to break further into public consciousness, you’re going to hear a lot about the possibility of new gospels being discovered, and the secular media will do its part to try to suggest that any that are found are as early as possible, so as to make them rivals for the canonical gospels.

Take all this with a big spoonful of salt.

While it is theoretically possible that documents from the first century could be found, it is more likely that additional works from later than that would be found. These might be simply copies of Gnostic works we found at Nag Hammadi and be no big deal (despite media hype) or they might be new documents. In any event, it would take a good bit of time to figure out what their dates are, and the first dates proposed would likely turn out to be wrong.

It is possible that documents could be discovered that would contain accurate historical traditions of Jesus or the apostles, but the discovery of anything actually by them is unlikely (which is not to say that we mightn’t find things falsely attributed to them).

If we did discover, say, a new letter of Paul that looked authentic, it would set off a huge debate in the Christian community over what to do with it, but the odds of it being added to the New Testament (certainly in our lifetimes) would be remote.

What it might do, though, is prompt a lot of folks to realize how dependent on Tradition we are for the canon of Scripture–that it was Tradition that guided the early Church in identifying as authentic the manuscripts that we now have in the Bible. Any new document appearing to be authentic would lack a tradition of use in the churches and thus would not readily be added to the Scriptures of any group of Christians–except those already favorable to Gnostic texts out of an attraction to heterodoxy and novelty.

More later on what would happen if we found such a document. In the meantime,

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That was a battle cry 169 years ago in the Battle of San Jacinto (san hah-sin-tah), the decisive battle for Texan Independence from Mexico.

The battle cry was uttered by the renowned Gen. Sam Houston (who later had a town named after him) and Darth Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was the villain of the Alamo Massacre.

"Remember the Alamo!" wasn’t the only battle cry of the day, though. "Remember Goliad!" also was.

Darth Santa Anna had also been in charge of the massacre at Goliad, at which he’d ordered all prisoners put to death.

And thus it was with the memory of these two massacres that the valiant Texican warriors of San Jacinto went forth to win their independence.

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Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!

That was a battle cry 169 years ago in the Battle of San Jacinto (san hah-sin-tah), the decisive battle for Texan Independence from Mexico.

The battle cry was uttered by the renowned Gen. Sam Houston (who later had a town named after him) and Darth Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was the villain of the Alamo Massacre.

"Remember the Alamo!" wasn’t the only battle cry of the day, though. "Remember Goliad!" also was.

Darth Santa Anna had also been in charge of the massacre at Goliad, at which he’d ordered all prisoners put to death.

And thus it was with the memory of these two massacres that the valiant Texican warriors of San Jacinto went forth to win their independence.

GET THE STORY.

Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!

March 15, 44 B.C.: Julius Caesar is assassinated by the super-hero teamgroup of senators called The Liberators.

Where why:

Romans used to have a king, just like everybody else.

Then they got rid of him and proclaimed themselves a Republic. In fact, that’s where we get the word "republic" from: res publica, which is Latin for "the public thing"–the body that governed Rome after they kicked out the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus ("Tarquin the Proud," no relation to Grand Moff Tarkin).

Tarquin the Proud got kicked out both because he was a big jerk and because he had an immoral son who raped a noblewoman named Lucretia (hence the famous "rape of Lucretia"). Lucretia got revenge by summong the menfolk of her family, telling them what happened, and killing herself. They then took revenge on her behalf by driving the Tarquin house into exile and, subsequently, proclaiming a republic.

Or so the story goes.

The Roman Republic didn’t go swimmingly, though. Its first head was a guy named Lucius Junius Brutus who was, well, "the Lucius Junius Brutus of his race" (a quote from The Mikado) who executed two of his own sons! He didn’t execute all his offspring, though, because one of his descendants, almost five centuries later, was Marcus Junius Brutus.

Marcus Junius Brutus was particular dissatisfied with the events of his own day.

The Republic had proven itself ineffectual in governing (though, one must concede, it had a good run of a number of centuries) and some centralization of power was needed. Having thrown off the shackles of having a king, though, the Romans were not only proud of that fact, they were smug about it. So no king for them. It was a point of honor. (And they were justly afraid about what a king would do.) So they didn’t want to centralize power in the person of just one man.

Instead three guys began unofficially to assume supreme power, and these three guys were known as The Triumvirate (which is based on the Latin for "The Three Guys": trium viri–or, more literally, "the Men of the Three").

That honked a bunch of people off, but what honked even more off was that the Triumvirate proved unstable, with two of the triumviri trying to seize personal power and one kind of sitting out the fight.

The Triumvir who won was none other than Gaius Julius Caesar. He never became emperor (that title went to his successor), but he did get named "dictator for life." (Kewl, huh?)

Well, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for ol’ Marcus Junius Brutus. He was descended from that guy who executed his own sons, ‘member? And that being the case, killing a cousin like Julius Caesar would be no sweat at all for such as him.

So that’s what he did: He and his Liberator buddies all thought Julius needed killin’, and so when Julius strides in, they stab him! And then they go and stab him twenty-two more times! Just to make sure he’s good an’ dead!

And they did all this on March 15, or the Ides of March (WHAT "IDES" ARE), which history (not just Shakespeare) records Julius as having been warned about by a fortuneteller.

And so they got the Republic back and avoided having a nasty ol’ king.

Well . . . not.

The Republic collapsed into Civil War and eventually there emerged a Second Triumvirate, which proved no more stable than the first and which had two of the triumviri trying to be king and one eventually got his wish, except that the Romans couldn’t bear to call him "king" so they called him "emperor" instead.

Romans, y’see, could have kings as long as they didn’t call them that.

Kinder the way America might one day (certainly not now) have an empire, only we would never be able to call it that.

Countries are funny like that.

Ain’t ancient history a hoot?

Oh, and Julius did apparently die saying something pretty close to "Et tu, Brute" or "Even you, Brutus?"

LEARN MORE THE LAST WORDS OF GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR.

ALSO LEARN ABOUT HOW GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR’S NAME WORKS.