Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, was well known in his lifetime as a comic dramatist. An early performance in Florence of The Mandrake caused Pope Leo X to insist that its actors and scenery be brought to Rome in 1520. In the prologue to Clizia, a play inspired by Plautus, Machiavelli wrote, “Comedies were invented to be of use and of delight to their audiences.”
Archive
Miscellany
When a theologian renting from ninth-century Islamic philosopher al-Kindi hosted two cousins for a monthlong visit, the landlord increased the rent proportionally. His reasoning: a dwelling has a “limited existence.” A tenant enjoys this without the burden of ownership, then leaves the space “a dung heap and in dilapidation, only repairable at grievous expense.”
Valhalla, the mythical hall for slain Norse warriors, is said to cater a nightly feast of boar meat but to offer no water to wash it down. According to the chief speaker of Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning, the warriors would have received a disappointing reward for their agonizing deaths in battle if served merely water. The menu instead includes mead supplied from the udder of a she-goat named Heidrun.
Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.
Thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist Mugai Nyodai, the world’s first Zen abbess, struggled to achieve enlightenment until, one night during her training, the bottom fell out of an old bamboo-bound pail she was using to carry water. The spill freed her. “No more water in the pail!” she wrote in a poem commemorating the experience. “No more moon in the water!”
Archaeologists in France discovered in 1865 a Stone Age human skull with a hole sawed in it. They believed it had served as a drinking vessel; one wrote the hole was “expressly made for the application of the lips.” But later study by an anatomist proved this to be incorrect: the skull was actually evidence of ancient brain surgery.
In ancient Athens if a citizen was accused of killing another citizen, he would be brought before the Areopagus, the highest court of law, and might face the death penalty. If the citizen was accused of killing a resident alien, a slave, or a foreigner, he was tried in a lower court, the Palladion, and faced, at worst, exile.
According to sixth-century-bc Greek poet Hipponax of Colophon, in times of drought, famine, or plague an ugly or deformed person was chosen by the community to be pharmakós, or scapegoat. After being fed figs, barley cake, and cheese, he would be struck on the genitals with the bulbs and twigs of wild plants, led on a procession accompanied by flute, and burned on a pyre. His ashes were thrown into the sea. It is believed that Hipponax, whom Pliny the Elder once called “notoriously ugly,” may have been exaggerating the ritual.
Around 1500 bc, the Hittite augur Maddunani sacrificed to the gods one goat kid, one piglet, and one puppy in an attempt to end an epidemic that had devastated the army. While puppies played “an extensive, and apparently vital” role in Hittite ritual, wrote historian Billie Jean Collins, “this is the only case in Hittite ritual of puppies being killed as an offering.”
“History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune in 1916. “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
“The splendors of this age outshine all other recorded ages,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871. “I have seen wrought five miracles—namely, the steamboat, the railroad, the electric telegraph, the application of the spectroscope to astronomy, the photograph.” He died in 1882, missing the invention of the machine gun by three years, the gramophone and radar by five years, and the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine by ten years.
In 1891 Erik Weisz began using the stage name Harry Houdini—the first name deriving from his nickname “Ehrie” and the surname from the great French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who himself had taken the surname from his wife, Josephe Cecile Eglantine Houdin, in order, he wrote, “to distinguish me from my numerous homonyms.”
Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” to raise money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal fund in 1883 and soon after embarked on a ship to London to promote the cause for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Her poem was only placed on a plaque at the foot of the “Mother of Exiles” in 1903, six years after her death.
For the 1968 DNC in Chicago, Esquire sent Terry Southern, Jean Genet, and William S. Burroughs to cover it. A “hard-hitting little press team,” Southern wrote, that, later joined by Allen Ginsberg, “had one hell of a time actually getting admitted to the hall, despite proper credentials. Burroughs and I, of course, are veritable paragons of fashion and decorum—but Ginsberg and Genet, it must be admitted, are pretty weird-looking guys.”
In 1878 the American consul in Bangkok presented a cat to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who named it Siam. It is believed to have been the first Siamese cat to enter the U.S.