The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
As the Persian Empire’s grip tightened by land and sea, it fell to one man to unite Greece in a last desperate bid to break it.
The Battle of Salamis in September 480 BC was the turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. By comparison with the small city-states of Greece, Xerxes’s highly centralised Persian empire was clumsy and backward, and the Greeks were ready to defend their superior civilisation to the death.
The blessing of trade free from political interference was one of most important insights in British, indeed world history.
In his day, Richard Cobden (1804-1865) was regarded as Britain’s answer to Karl Marx. Where Marxism stands for State control, bloody violence and political oppression, Cobden showed that the free market led to prosperity through peace, cooperation, and freedom.
Horatius Cocles was the last man standing between Rome’s republic and the return of totalitarian government in 509 BC.
Before it became a republic, Rome was ruled by seven kings, absolute monarchs. The last of these was King Tarquin the Proud, who was forced out in 509 BC. He was not the man to give up his throne easily.
The Roman Emperor Honorius, so the story goes, had more on his mind than the impending sack of one of Europe’s iconic cities.
After the Roman Empire split into East and West, Constantinople’s glories in the East contrasted sharply with Rome’s growing vulnerability, and in 410, Alaric the Goth beseiged the former capital.
Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with nearly 50,000 men and 38 elephants is the stuff of legend.
In 218 BC the North African empire of Carthage and the Roman Republic stood, as they often did, on the brink of war. But when war came, it came not from Africa but from Cartagena on the east coast of Spain.