As a member of a Cherokee delegation to Washington, DC, Sam Houston wore traditional loincloth and blanket to an 1818 meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who was offended and chastised Houston for his dress. Twenty-two years later, between terms as president of the Republic of Texas, Houston wore such a blanket to meet Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, comte de Saligny, in Austin.
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Banished from the kingdom of Kindah, the sixth-century prince and poet Imru al-Qays spent much of his life wandering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula developing the literary genre wuquf ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins.” “The courtyards and enclosures of the old home have become desolate,” he wrote in one verse, “the dung of the wild deer lies there thick as the seeds of pepper.”
The Umayyad poet Dhu al-Rumma, of the Bedouin tradition, was known to ask his listeners to transcribe his poems as he was reciting them, declaring that a book “does not forget or alter words or phrases which have taken the poet a long time to compose.”
Friendship cannot exist “between the well-fed, prosperous / and the lean and down-and-out in the world,” states the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian animal fables from around the third century bc. In one story, when a crow tries to befriend a mole after witnessing his impressive skill in escaping from hunters’ traps, the mole exclaims, “You are the eater; I am the food. What kind of friendship can exist between us?”
“Pompeii like any other town,” Herman Melville wrote in his journal during an 1867 visit. “Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.”
In 1980 seven members of Congress were caught up in the Abscam bribery scandal after an FBI sting. Florida congressman Richard Kelly was caught on surveillance camera stuffing $25,000 in cash into his pockets. “Does it show?” Kelly asked an undercover FBI agent dressed as a sheikh. Only one congressman refused the proffered bribe. “Wait a minute,” said Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. “What you are suggesting may be illegal.”
In his third-century Interpretation of Dreams, Artemidorus lauded the soothsaying accuracy of Aristander, to whom Alexander the Great, while besieging the city of Tyre, Tyros in Greek, reported that he had dreamed of a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander said that “satyr,” satyros in Greek, could be broken into “sa” and “Tyros,” meaning “Tyros is yours,” and encouraged Alexander to redouble his attacks. The Macedonian did, and he took the city.
Ellen Eglin, a housekeeper working in Washington, DC, devised a clothes wringer in 1888 to make washing and drying more efficient. Instead of patenting her invention, she sold the rights to an agent for eighteen dollars, bringing the new owner “great financial success,” according to an 1890 article. “If it was known that a Negro woman patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer,” she told the reporter.
The Book of the General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts, passed in 1647 and published the following year, contained capital law number fourteen, stating that a “stubborn or rebellious son” could be put to death.
Astronomers theorizing the existence of small moons orbiting larger moons have proposed calling them “moonmoons.” The planet Kepler-1625b, which has a Neptune-sized moon distantly orbiting it, was cited as “sort of the best-case scenario for a moonmoon.”
Thomas Edison received three months of formal education at the age of eight before his mother homeschooled him. Benjamin Franklin quit school at age ten, Charles Dickens at twelve.
Edith Wharton’s childhood German tutor, Anna Bahlmann, also taught her English and American literature; Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology; and history, art, and architecture. In 1878 Wharton called Bahlmann her “supreme critic” in a letter. Bahlmann is mentioned only four times in Wharton’s memoir and only once by name. One scholar suggested that Wharton’s “conviction about her intellectual and artistic isolation…compelled her to deny her closeness to her teacher.”
A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”
After he was captured by pirates, Diogenes of Sinope was sold as a slave to Xeniades, who had the Cynic philosopher educate his sons. “At home he taught them to attend to their own needs,” writes Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, “to live on plain food and water, to wear their hair short and unadorned, to go barefoot and without a tunic, and to be silent and keep their eyes lowered when walking in the streets.”
Vomitorium, noun: A large passageway in an ancient amphitheater out of which crowds emptied. In Antic Hay, published in 1924, Aldous Huxley became the first recorded author in English to state erroneously that it was a domestic room in which overfed Romans vomited after feasts.