History

For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political... See more

According to Goethe, Byron’s poetical power eclipsed all other mortals, and he was not held back by petty morality, being possessed of a virtue of which the bourgeoisie had no conception.

On both days, the extraordinary beauty of the flame arising from the funeral pile was noticed. The weather was beautifully fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the shore as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue sky intensely contrasted with one another: marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the... See more

What we know for sure about the early alphabet’s background is linguistic and material. It is widely agreed that the early alphabet a) represents a West Semitic language ancestral to Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic; b) but based its signs on the Egyptian writing system, and c) was— as far as we know— not done by scribes or professional writers but... See more

You must go down into the world of mortals like a ray of light, like a shower of refreshing rain; you must illuminate it like Apollo, shake it to its depths and give it a new life like Zeus, otherwise you are not worthy of your heaven.