Japanese imperial history relates that Prince Shotoku “in person prepared for the first time laws” with a constitution in 604. “All men are influenced by class feelings, and there are few who are intelligent,” he declared, lamenting bribe-taking judges with whom lawsuits by rich men are always effective—“like the stone flung into water”—while the “plaints of the poor” never get anywhere, as “water cast upon a stone.”
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Athenaeus wrote that fourth-century-bc Greek courtesan Phryne was so beautiful “she used to wear a tunic covering her whole person” because it was “not easy to see her naked.” Once prosecuted for a capital crime, she was about to be declared guilty when the orator pleading her case brought her to the middle of the court and ripped off her tunic. The judges, “so moved by pity,” acquitted her of all charges.
“I went sailing up to Great Point, which is fourteen miles. It was fine and rough so we went out in the open ocean and shipped water grandly. I have bought a large swordfish sword for the agassiz of an old salt by the name of Judas,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to his brother Marcelline in one of his earliest known letters, shortly after his eleventh birthday, in 1910.
During the Middle Ages, wild animals were often believed to be devil-possessed. Wolves, moles, and caterpillars were tried in courts and executed. A story is told of Saint Dominic catching a sparrow, plucking it alive, and rejoicing in his triumph over the powers of darkness. By 1531 a legist argued that “rural pests would simply laugh” at civil-court censure but “have greater fear” of the Church’s power of anathema and should be excommunicated.
Having come to the U.S. through Portugal, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated part of The Little Prince—one of the best-selling works of fiction of all time—in a twenty-two room mansion on Long Island in 1942. “I wanted a hut,” he reflected, “and it’s the Palace of Versailles.”
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab recently determined that all cultural products “follow a universal decay function.” People and things are kept alive through “oral communication” for about five to thirty years. “Biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (twenty to thirty years),” according to their report, “and music the shortest (5.6 years).”
“Demotic habits,” wrote the British clergyman Sydney Smith in support of the Reform Bill of 1832, “will be more common in a country where the rich are forced to court the poor for power.”
While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
In his catalogue of the world’s people in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder mentioned Scythians who feed on human flesh, Africans who “are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant,” the Arimaspi who have only one eye, the Adrogyni who possess male and female parts, and the Monocoli who are born with “only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility.”
Including trademarks in books became crucial after the invention of the printing press; without stringent copyright laws, rival publishers could repurpose superiorly edited texts with impunity. Aldus Manutius of Venice, who employed Erasmus as a proofreader, called attention to his company’s “sign of the dolphin wound round the anchor.” Florentine printers were aping the mark, but in the frauds, “the head of the dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned to the right.”
In 1840 Mikhail Lermontov published his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, in which the protagonist, Pechorin, kills a fellow officer in a duel in the Caucasus. A year later, Lermontov wrote in a poem, “In noon’s heat, in a dale of Dagestan / With lead inside my breast, stirless I lay; / The deep wound still smoked on.” Within a few months, Lermontov was dead, killed in a duel with a fellow officer in the Caucasus, shot through the heart after firing his own gun into the air.
The first lines spoken by the old shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale are, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
From History of Dearborn, Ohio, and Switzerland Counties, Indiana (1885): “It has been repeated time and again that the annexation of Texas was carried in the U.S. Senate by one vote; that Edward A. Hannegan, then the U.S. senator from Indiana, was elected to the Senate by one vote, and that that one vote was given Hannegan by Daniel Kelso, then senator from Switzerland County, who was elected by one majority. This is an error, for Kelso, when he voted for Hannegan, represented Switzerland County by virtue of a majority of about 150 voters of the county, over Samuel Howard, at the August election of 1842. In 1843 David Henry was elected over Kelso by one majority. Kelso contested the election, and the Senate declared that neither was elected and sent them back to the people for decision, and at the August election, 1844, Henry was elected by a small but decided majority.”
The Chinese Communist Party requires that all published books be assigned a “book number” by the government; between 2003 and 2004 the General Administration of Press and Publication banned around fifty periodicals and dictionaries for using registration numbers illegally obtained from other books. In January 2004 the People’s Daily reported that two men had been sentenced to seven and nine years in prison by a court in Anhui Province for “unlawful operation of a business.” The men had published a book of love poetry using fraudulent book numbers.
A temperance movement “Anti-Saloon Battle Hymn” from 1907 describes the saloon as an “awful, unspeakable monster” that “makes millions of widows and orphans, / and drunkards of millions of men” and asks that “from its shackles, O God, do thou free us, / and for freedom we ever will stand.” In 1914 the song “Emancipation” pleaded for “not one slave” of alcohol to remain in this nation of “true liberty so grand.”