Caesar, to the Ides
Part 1 of the Caesar–Cleopatra period. The life to 15 March 44 BC, stated from the surviving sources: who he was, how he came to command armies, and what was in motion when he was killed.
Lives followed closely — rulers, servants of the state, engineers and the people whose names the record kept or lost.
Part 1 of the Caesar–Cleopatra period. The life to 15 March 44 BC, stated from the surviving sources: who he was, how he came to command armies, and what was in motion when he was killed.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the sixteen days of 458 BC, and how early Rome was actually governed — from the seven kings who built the city to the office designed to be handed back,…
Edmund Morel (1840–1871): a young British civil engineer who, in nineteen months and while dying of tuberculosis, designed Japan’s first railway, set the gauge of its entire…
Mary Morrell (c. 1620–1704) crossed the Atlantic as a teenage indentured servant, was bought out of her bond for twenty pounds by a young Norfolk man who never regretted the price,…
Mordecai — an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, of the house of King Saul — rose to steward the Persian court, refused to bow to Haman, and helped turn back a royal decree to…
In 1835 a petty Tennessee thief was turned into the secret emperor of a thousand outlaws — by a man hiding behind an invented name. The legend got more people killed than the criminal…
Caesarion — the only son Caesar is recorded as having, the last of the Ptolemies, and what became of his record.
Part of the claimants thread. Everything the record holds on Herod the Great, and then the question of what it can support about him — and what it cannot.
From Dol-de-Bretagne to Culloden — a Breton patriline across nine centuries
Thomas More — lawyer, humanist, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor of England — resigned his office and finally lost his head rather than swear an oath he held to be false.…