Sublime

Les hommes n’ont pas d’autre issue que de combattre. L’Iliade ressemble au poème de la prédestination. Pour Homère, les sociétés humaines recourent toujours à l’affrontement lorsqu’elles se rencontrent. C’est leur destin, leur fatalité. Le vieux poète a raison. L’Histoire en constitue l’infatigable preuve : l’hostilité a toujours constitué la

Aristodemus,

He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example. A job whose objective could be boiled down to the single understatement, as he did at the Hot Gates on the morning he died, of “performing the commonplace under uncommonplace

the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end. Well, what was history if not that? And how would having the stars change anything?

Socrates lived a remarkable life. He also died a remarkable death: He had been tried for corrupting the youth of Athens and other alleged misdeeds, found guilty by his fellow citizens, and sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. He could have avoided this punishment by throwing himself on the mercy of the court or by running away after the

Herodotus, we must remember, tried to re-create, for the most part, the atmosphere and the events of the past, some of it so remote that he would not have been able to interview anyone who had been alive at the time.

Knowledge must lead to understanding. In the field of history, even when largely restricted to contemporary history, that meant trying to grasp general ideas about human behaviour, in war and politics, in revolution and government.

The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one’s laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.