Reviews and News:
An Italian journalist claims to have discovered the identity of novelist Elena Ferrante. She is Anita Raja, “a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later married a Neapolitan magistrate.”
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A failed euro? “What a difference 17 years make. Sitting in the cocktail lounge of Paris’ elegant Prince de Galles hotel in June of 1999 — as the franc was being phased out and the euro was being phased in — all the talk was about how the rapidly-expanding European Union, now armed with a common currency, was about to leave us backward, reactionary Yanks eating dust. The EU and Japan, one was constantly told, were riding the crest of the Wave of the Future as the American Century ended and Uncle Sam slipped into his dotage. Not quite. In fact, not at all…This is thanks largely to an overreaching Eurocracy that was so eager to overtake the United States in size, population and economic power that it bit off far more than it could chew, much less digest.”
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A history of conscience: “It is significant that the first explicit example of conscience is to be found in Ancient Greece, in Sophocles’ Antigone. When faced with the choice between obeying a royal command to leave her brother unburied, on the one hand, and flouting the king’s authority, on the other, Antigone hears an inner voice that compels her to rebel. She does what she considers to be right after careful deliberation, regardless of the pressure she receives from an authoritarian government. Antigone can rightly be seen as the inventor of conscience. Her personal morality turns a kingdom on its head.”
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Beckett’s miserably busy final years: “‘Forgive delay in answering yours of Jan 18,’ he writes to Alan Schneider in February 1966. ‘Have been up to my eyes since Xmas. Preparing and shooting here film of Play, then London for Eh Joe with Jack and a record and poetry reading with same. Back now finishing film and rehearsing new show at Odéon. Play, Come & Go, Pinget’s Hypothèse and two Ionesco shorts — Délire à Deux & La Lacune.’ When he’s not working he’s busy refusing work: declining Harvard over something or other, refusing to write an article for Esquire about the Democratic convention in Chicago, putting off Polanski from doing a film of Godot and generally ‘Fighting off TV louts on various fronts — successfully so far.'”
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Christianity and the free society: “While many Christians have undermined human liberty, a new book of essays shows just how much of our contemporary freedom we owe to the Christian church, Christian thinkers, and Christian practice.”
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Patrick Leigh Fermor’s lust and wanderlust: “From the first letter, written in 1940, soon after he joined the Irish Guards, until the last in 2010, sent when he was ninety-four, he was on a lifelong search for erotic, alcoholic, intellectual and courageous diversion. One moment he’s in Crete, meeting the partisans who helped him kidnap the Nazi general Heinrich Kreipe, his most dashing escapade. The next he’s at Chatsworth, sitting next to Camilla Parker Bowles – ‘immensely nice, non-show-off, full of charm and very funny’.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Barry Strauss revisits the “proto-populist movements of the Roman Republic”:
“It was the summer of 133 B.C. In Rome, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, Tribune of the Plebs, and his supporters gathered in the pre-dawn hours and occupied the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill high above the Forum. The political situation was tense and had been escalating ever since he passed a land reform bill over the Senate’s opposition earlier that year. To protect himself and his legislation, Gracchus was now running for an unprecedented second term in succession as tribune. The Senate opposed this unconstitutional procedure. Many Senators thought that Gracchus wanted to ride a wave of popular support to make himself tyrant. For their part, Gracchus and their supporters feared for their lives.
“Rome was a republic. Its champions saw it as the epitome of what the ancients called a mixed constitution. The historian Polybius, writing during Gracchus’s lifetime, praised it as a regime that balanced monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Rome’s powerful magistrates, headed by two consuls annually elected for one-year terms, represented the monarchical element. The Senate (literally, the Elders), a council of ex-magistrates who supervised the regime, represented the aristocracy. The people took part in electoral and legislative assemblies—the democratic element. Furthermore, the people had special representatives, the ten tribunes, elected annually for one-year terms. The tribunes had the power to veto the action of any other part of the Roman government, but they rarely used that potent tool. Ordinarily the tribunes were ambitious men, on the way up, and took care not to offend the powerful. Gracchus was different.
“He wanted to solve the knotty problem of land, poverty, and the army. The ideal Roman soldier was a peasant farmer. To serve in the military he had to meet a minimum property requirement—the Romans did not want to give weapons to landless men. By 133 B.C., however, things were out of joint. While off for years fighting Rome’s wars, many soldiers had lost their farms to creditors at home. To add to the problem, they also lost the ability to graze their herds on so-called ‘public land,’ that is, land that the Romans had confiscated in the process of conquering Italy. Wealthy and powerful senators had gobbled up public land in violation of an earlier law limiting private ownership of such land. Gracchus wanted to solve the crisis by settling Roman citizens on public land in Italy and thereby making them eligible for military service.
“To his supporters Gracchus was a hero, to his opponents a rogue aristocrat. Who was Gracchus? His father, also Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, had served twice as consul; his mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of the great Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal and a general whom J. F. C. Fuller judged greater than Napoleon. His great-uncle had conquered Macedon; his brother-in-law had destroyed Carthage. Gracchus was, in short, a man of the establishment—and then he turned reformer. Some said he was a revolutionary. He started out with a certain amount of restraint and with the backing of other powerful elites, but he quickly generated enormous opposition. He responded by becoming increasingly radical and lost some of his original elite support. He certainly broke the rules, and he threatened powerful interests by proposing to redistribute land from the rich to the poor, with only limited compensation paid to those who lost property; the land belonged to the Roman people anyhow, he argued, and the rich had taken it in an illegal power grab.”
“He was a powerful speaker, as even Cicero, who was no admirer, attests. Earlier that year when addressing the crowd from the Rostra, the speakers’ platform in the Forum, Gracchus spoke on behalf of his proposed law. As Plutarch notes, he pointed out that many of those who would benefit had lost their land while away fighting for their country in the legions…Over enormous opposition Gracchus’s bill was passed, but its future was a question mark. Its opponents tried to use another one of the ten tribunes to thwart Gracchus, but he countered by having the man deposed from office. Then he intervened in the senate’s bailiwick of financial affairs and foreign policy by taking control of a bequest to the Roman state from abroad and earmarked it to fund the commission that would redistribute land. All was turmoil in Roman politics. And so Rome reached the violent summer of 133 B.C.”
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Image of the Day: Dutch sunrise
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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Fog”
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