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The authors of the ‘Cato Letters’ recalled how Greek general Timoleon replied when the people he had saved from oppression turned and bit him.
In one of their ‘Cato Letters’ (1720-23), John Trenchard MP and Thomas Gordon praised Roman Emperors Nerva and Trajan for dismissing the spies and informers hitherto used to gag critics of State policy; and they recalled how Timoleon, the Greek general who toppled dictators for a living, had never felt more proud than when the Opposition slandered him in Parliament.
Posted June 19 2022
236
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.
Posted June 15 2022
237
Benjamin Franklin recalls the disciplines he put himself through on the way to becoming one of America’s literary giants.
Ben Franklin’s father, to head him off from going to sea, apprenticed him at twelve to his elder brother James, a printer in Boston, Massachusetts. Eager to improve his command of prose writing, Ben entered into an informal writing competition with another boy from his neighbourhood, John Collins, on the subject of women’s education; but this only made him acutely aware of his shortcomings.
Posted June 14 2022
238
Despite failing health, Peter the Great of Russia leapt into Kronstadt Bay to save some young sailors from a watery grave.
By the autumn of 1724, kidney disease was exaggerating Emperor Peter the Great’s contradictions. Fleeting bursts of ill-temper had settled into peevish melancholy; he had fallen out with his mentor Alexander Menshikov; he had quitted his palace to live in a wooden cottage; and exhausting days of duty merged into exhausting nights of wine. But in a crisis, the old Peter was still there.
Posted June 13 2022
239
Thomas Pitt’s tenure as Governor of Madras was regarded as a golden age, but what he is remembered for is his diamond.
The East India Company was founded late in the reign of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) to explore the possibilities of overseas trade. By the 1670s, the Company had secured a legal monopoly on English trade in India, but some free spirits chose to go into business for themselves. In 1926, a historian modestly calling himself ‘an Indian Mahomedan’ told us about one of them: Thomas Pitt.
Posted June 9 2022
240
A transported convict writes home to England urging his wife to join him as soon as possible.
Caroline Chisholm (1808–1877) spent the years 1838 to 1846 in Australia, helping migrants to settle in and reunite with their families. On Tuesday February 26th, 1850, Charles Dickens, who was preparing the very first issue of Household Words, called on her in the hope of publishing some of the migrants’ letters she had acquired. The following passage is taken from one of those letters.
Posted June 5 2022