Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley, 1778. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
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Miscellany
Suetonius, a biographer of Roman emperors, claimed that the violent ruler Tiberius had a clifftop location in Capri from which he liked to watch his victims thrown into the sea. “A party of marines were stationed below,” Suetonius wrote, “and when the bodies came hurtling down, they whacked at them with oars and boathooks, to make sure that they were completely dead.”
Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
The World in Time
Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More