Recognizable quotes on the ancient Romans: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” “All roads lead to Rome.” “Rome was not built in a day.” Caesar Augustus boasted, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”     

     The poet Virgil observed, “So vast a toil it was to found the State of Rome.”

     In ancient times, the city of Rome astonished everyone. The Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Forum, the Temple of Vespasian, the Palace of the Caesars on the Palatine, the tens of thousands of statues. All these and countless more amazed the ancient world. 

     A 20th-century historian, Frank Richard Cowell, wrote, “The vast metropolis of Rome from the first century A.D. onwards was more splendid than anything that had been seen on earth before or has since been seen. Building and rebuilding always went on.”

     Mary Beard, a 21st-century British historian, published in 2015 a book on ancient Rome that she entitled “SPQR,” meaning “The Senate and People of Rome.” 

     Of the city of Rome, she wrote, “a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants,” and “a mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride, and murderous civil war.”

     The Roman Republic swallowed much of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. The Empire then ruled the conquered lands and people by two axioms: keep the peace and pay taxes. 

     Otherwise, a conquered people could live as before. They kept their language, their laws, their religion, their coins, and their customs, but they had to keep the peace and pay taxes to Rome.

     “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

     Should a conquered people rebel or refuse to pay taxes, Roman armies would appear in an instant and slaughter, or decimate, the people in a most shocking and brutal manner.

     Yet, allegiance to Rome ensured that a conquered people received a multitude of benefits.

     In 1979, an English comedy acting group, known as Monty Python, produced a film entitled, “Life of Brian.” The film tells of Brian Cohen, a young man living in Judea in the first century.

     In one scene, a gang of thugs are planning an assassination upon a Roman official, Pontius Pilate, when the gang’s leader asks his fellow thugs, “What have the Romans ever given to us?”  

     In the movie’s scene, the thugs think about all of Rome’s gifts to them, and they answer: “the aqueduct, sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, public health.”

     The gang’s leader, played by John Cleese, then asks, “All right, apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” One thug answers, “brought peace.”

     Indeed, Pax Romana or Roman Peace lasted for 200 years, from 27 BC, with the reign of Caesar Augustus, until180 AD, with the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Over those 200 years, the Roman empire was for the most part free of conflict, battles, and civil wars. 

     “Unprecedented economic prosperity” spread throughout the Empire during Pax Romana.

     An 18th-century British historian named Edward Gibbon wrote a massive three-volume work between 1776 to 1788, entitled “The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.” 

      In Gibbon’s first sentence, he wrote, “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”

     A lad who grew up in 16th-century England named William Shakespeare loved the stories of the ancient Romans. Hence, he wrote two plays, “Julius Caesar,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”

     A favorite quote of mine from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Prior to a battle on the plains of Phillipi, Brutus wonders aloud, “O that a man might know the end of this day’s business ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.”

     Next time in these pages: more on Mary Beard and her 2023 book, “Emperor of Rome.” 

 Jane Goodall turned 90 years old last April. In the late 1950’s, Jane—then an English girl in her twenties—dared to travel to Africa. There she met the renowned anthropologist, Louis Leaky, who suggested she study chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

     Jane arrived at Gombe on July 14, 1960, with her mother, who acted as Jane’s chaperone.

     On December 22, 1965, a Wednesday, “National Geographic” ran a televised documentary on Jane’s work over the previous five years, entitled, “Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees.”

     I watched that special on my grandparents’ black and white television.

     Jane began, “Louis Leakey sent me to Gombe because he believed an understanding of chimpanzees would help him better guess how our stone-age ancestors may have behaved.”

     In an instant, Jane was world-famous. She said, “It was because chimps are so eye-catching, so like us, that my work was recognized world wide.”

     Days ago, I happened to re-watch a “60 Minutes” segment from April 9, 2006, on Daphne Sheldrick’s orphanage near Nairobi in Kenya, an orphanage for elephants. Poachers kill the parents for their ivory tusks, and leave the young alone, defenseless, grieving for their loss.

     Daphne, now deceased, rescued them, fed them, and taught them how to survive in the wild. 

     Bob Simon, of CBS, asked Daphne, “What is the most extraordinary thing she has learned about elephants?”

     She answered, “Their tremendous capacity for caring is I think perhaps the most amazing thing about them.  Even at a very young age. Their sort of forgiveness, unselfishness. They have all the best attributes of us humans and not very many of the bad.”

     “Indeed,” she says, “A loss of a parent can cause a baby elephant to grieve to death.”

     Cephalopods are marine animals, and within this class of mollusks, one will find squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and nautilus. Scientist have discovered that a typical octopus displays advanced intelligence, the highest among the invertebrates. 

     For example, Inky, a former resident of New Zealand’s aquarium, escaped to freedom by slipping through a gap at the top of its tank, and then squeezing through a small drain pipe that led to the wider ocean. Workers followed a trail left by Inky’s suction marks.     

     Joshua Hawkins, in last week’s edition of BGR, Boy Genius Report, reveals that astronomers at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, have “discovered cosmic tunnels that connect our solar system to the star constellation Centaurus.”

     “Using the eRosita x-ray instrument, researchers believe that the tunnel appears to move through the material that makes up the Local Hot Bubble, a feature of our solar system.”

     In Ralph Waldo’s first book, “Nature,” published in 1836, he too mentions stars.

     “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.”

     Emerson also mentions the woods. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” 

     He concludes, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.” 

     Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s protege, said in his book, “Walden,” first published in 1854,   

     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The woods called for Thoreau, and he answered.

     Chimpanzees, elephants, octopi, cosmic tunnels, stars, the woods. Pick one. All of nature calls out, “Look at us!” A challenge. A resolution. Do we dare to devote 30 minutes per day over the next 365 days, 8760 hours, of 2025, to learning even a small slice of our natural world?

     Mother Nature rewards those who pay attention to her.  

The fire began at 6:30 p.m., Paris local time, on Monday, April 15, 2019. An hour later, people, who watched from a distance, stared in horror as the top portion of the 300 foot spire broke off and crashed down through the cathedral’s roof.

     Some 400 firefighters, working from the inside, extinguished the last of the flames by 3:40 a.m., on Tuesday, by pointing low-pressure water hoses at the flames, to minimize damage to the contents, pulling thousands of gallons of water from the Seine River via a pump boat.

     At the same time, some 100 policemen and municipal workers formed a human chain and passed objects from inside to outside, in a valiant effort to preserve them.

     The next morning authorities assessed the damage. The wooden-beamed lattice work inside the attic that ran the length of the cathedral was destroyed, but the twin bell towers at the west end stood intact, as did the organ’s 8,000 pipes, and the rose-tinted stained glass windows.

     On Wednesday, April 17, President Emmanuel Macron promised the French people that the state would rebuild the cathedral in five years.

     The first steps were to clear out the charred beams and the scorched limestones, secure the interior from the elements by a massive tarpaulin stretched over scaffolding, and work to ensure that the 28 flying buttresses that supported the exterior walls would stand and not collapse.

     Once workers completed the clean-up, officials split the reconstruction work into 140 lots and requested bids. They selected some 250 businesses.

     About 2000 oaks trees from across France were selected, cut down, dried, and transported to sawmills, where carpenters began to cut, hew, and assemble them into rafters for the attic.

     Blacksmiths forged certain tools that the carpenters were required to use—two-man crosscut saws, broadaxes, etc.—the same tools that medieval workers used on the original attic.

     Some 45,000 cubic feet of stone was transported to the site to rebuild the collapsed vaults.    

     On December 7, 2024, President Macron opened the doors of the re-created cathedral.

     It is a miracle that the work was finished in five and a half years, just days before Christmas. 

     Builders began work on Notre Dame in 1163 A.D., and the work lasted for at least 180 years. 

     In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France inside Notre Dame. 

     In the 19th century, the French writer, Victor Hugo, built his fictional tale, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” around Quasimodo, a bell-ringer in the towers. 

     In 1944, Notre Dame hosted Charles de Gaulle for France’s liberation from the Nazi’s.

     There are those who insist upon a stupendous worship venue, like Notre Dame, massive, elaborate, and awe-inspiring. Others, including the 17th-century Puritans, argued for simplicity, and a reserved sanctuary, without stained-glass windows, statues, paintings, vestments, etc. 

     The Friends, aka the Quakers, are more extreme. They insist upon a barren meeting house, with wooden benches, no focal points, like altars or pulpits. “Their meeting houses often resemble local residential buildings and avoid ornamentation, spires, and steeples.”

     Which kind of worship venue is correct? The answer depends upon a person’s preference. I like a pipe organ, a piano, a choir, an altar, a pulpit, and stained glass windows. Others may not.

     Yet, one can argue for simplicity by reading Luke 2.

     Shepherds at night on a rocky hillside, an angel, a heavenly choir sings, “Glory to God in the highest. Peace on earth. Goodwill to all men.” The shepherds find the child in Bethlehem lying in a manger, or a feed trough. Sheep, shepherds, a stable, a manger, not a refined venue.

     One can argue for the opposite by reading Matthew 2. That writer mentions three Magi from the East bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, three of life’s finer things. 

     Whichever venue you prefer, with ornamentation or without, embellished or stark, enjoy the Christmas season. Peace to my readers.

Fintan O’Toole, a writer for “The New York Review of Books,” wrote in his July 18, 2024 column, that, “Being close to Trump was like being friends with a hurricane.” O’Toole lists a series of people’s names who worked for Trump, believed him, and then faced legal troubles.  

     Rudy Giuliani appeared in court in New York City, on Tuesday, November 26, 2024, because he failed to turn over all his assets to the court.

     His crime: he defamed two election workers in the state of Georgia, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, accusing them of election fraud in the 2020 election in that state. The pair took Giuliani to court, and a judge awarded them $148 million, reduced later to $146 million.

     Giuliani pleaded with the judge, “I have no car, no credit card, no cash. They have put stop orders on my business accounts, and I can’t pay my bills.” The judge was less than sympathetic.

     It gets worse. In July, officials disbarred Giuliani in the State of New York, and in September, Washington D.C. did the same. Thus, Giuliani has lost his means to a livelihood. 

     In November of 2018, Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time attorney, pleaded guilty to lying to a Congressional committee. In December that year, a judge sentenced Cohen to three years in a federal prison. In all, he served thirteen and a half months, plus one and a half years at home. 

     Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, sat in prison twice.

     On August 18, 2022, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts of evading $344,745 in taxes over fifteen years. He was required to pay back “almost $2 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties, without any right to appeal.” In 2023, he served 100 days in prison.   

    The second time, in 2024, Weisselberg served five months in prison, on Riker’s Island, for two counts of perjury, lying under oath, during Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial.

     Steve Bannon was released from prison on October 29, 2024, “after serving a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in Congress’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol.” 

     Bannon’s next trial is now set for February 2025, this time for wire fraud and money laundering related to his scheme to raise funds for a charity, “We Build the Wall.” He and his cohorts raised $25 million but retained hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves.

     On the final day of Trump’s presidency, in January 2021, he pardoned Bannon of federal crimes, but Bannon faces state charges for the same crimes.

     After almost four years, 944 defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on January 6, 2021. About 562 have received prison sentences. The Justice Department continues to arrest and prosecute attackers, once identified. 

     On November 8, 2024, two Chicago men, Michael Mollo Jr., and Emil Kozeluh, were arrested for their participation in the criminal attack upon the Capitol Building.

     Certain of Trump’s closest advisors in the White House have either faced prosecution or still may: Mark Meadows, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulus, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and Sidney Powell.

     On November 12, 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a plea from Mark Meadows to move his Fulton County, Georgia election interference prosecution to a federal court.

     Certain of Trump’s lawyers have faced indictment for their words and actions over the 2020 election: Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman. 

     Fintan O’Toole said, “each paid legal bills and will always bear the stamp of criminality.”

     Certain of Trump’s enablers escaped legal trouble: Mike Pence, William Barr, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, John Kelley, Chris Christie, and Mick Mulvaney. Yet, O’Toole said, each had to “face Trump’s sadistic ingratitude.”

     O’Toole writes, “The ruler’s ultimate expression of power is the destruction of those on whom he has relied most, the ones who have been such good servants.” 

     A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby,” sums it up. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” 

Strange how certain books captivate my interest, others not as much. I find myself going back again and again to reread Mark Forsyth’s 2013 book, “The Elements of Eloquence.”

     In Forsyth’s “Preface,” he writes, “Shakespeare was not a genius. He was the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. Instead, he learned rhetorical techniques and tricks.”

     Of Shakespeare’s first plays—“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Titus Andronicus,” and “Henry VI, Part 1”—Forsyth says, “there is not a single memorable line in them.” But the young poet / playwright kept learning, and transformed himself into a word craftsman.

     Forsyth argues that Shakespeare’s first memorable line was from “Henry VI, Part 2,” when one peasant says to another, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Then in “Henry VI, Part 3,” a character says, “I can smile, and murder while I smile,” an example of anastrophe.

     In each additional play, Shakespeare learned to lay down a series of thought-provoking lines. In “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Julius Caesar,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” he chocked each full of wonderful lines.

     A wit once called those illuminating lines, “Jewels in your mouth.”

     A favorite of mine is found in “Julius Caesar,” “O that a man might know the end of this day’s business, ere it come, but it sufficeth that it will end and then the end is known.” 

     Forsyth writes a series of quick chapters, 39 in all, and in each he describes a single rhetorical trick. The first chapter he entitles “Alliteration,” and then says, “Nobody knows why we love to hear words that begin with the same letter, but we do.”

     For example, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” comes from “The Tempest,” and, “The barge she sat like a burnished throne, Burned on the water,” from “Antony and Cleopatra.”

     In recent years, people would say, “ban the bomb,” “power to the people,” “put a tiger in your tank,” “it’s enough to get your goat,” “cool as a cucumber,” and “dead as a doornail.” 

     On page 12, Forsyth makes a startling statement. “You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”

     “Alliteration is the simplest way to turn a memorable phrase.”

     In chapter 16, Forsyth considers the “Tricolon.” Three is a magic number. “Eat, drink, and be merry.” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” “Truth, justice, and the American way.” “Faith, hope, and love.” “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

     Not one, not two, and not four, but three items points to completeness.  

     In chapter 21, Forsyth explains that Shakespeare surrendered to iambic pentameter, what Forsyth calls, “the Rolls-Royce of verse forms,” or “the king of English verse forms.”

     An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, “te-TUM.” A series of five iambs in a row, a single line, is a pentameter: te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM.

     Two examples: “If music be the food of love, play on,” from “Twelfth Night,” and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” from “Hamlet.” Each line contains just ten syllables.

     Tuesday of this week, November 19, marked the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

     I wonder, how did Lincoln learn to write like that? Brief, to the point, only 272 words, inspirational, motivating. Lincoln read a lot, most often Shakespeare’s tragedies. He read and re-read “Macbeth” throughout his life, often aloud to others whom he forced to listen.

     John Hay said of Lincoln, “He read Shakespeare more than all the other writers together.”

     Near the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln tried his hand at the elements of eloquence when he tied alliteration to a tricolon, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” 

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected President of the United States of America on November 6, 1860, for a four-year term. One year later, on November 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected President of the Confederate States of America for a six-year term. 

     Between those two dates, eleven states, each in the south, voted to secede from the Union and form their own government, the Confederates States of America. 

     That division between north and south over the issue of slavery had widened into a chasm that neither side could bridge. It was Lincoln’s victory that prompted the southern states to secede. The southerners feared that Lincoln would terminate slavery, their way of life.

     Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on February 22, 1862, George Washington’s birthday, in Montgomery, Alabama. Some 10,000 people came out to witness the inauguration.

     Jefferson Davis spoke that day and said,

    “I enter upon the duties of the office to which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to our enjoyment of the separate existence and independence which we have asserted, and, with the blessing of Providence, intend to maintain.”

     That hope had already been dashed ten months before, on April 12-13, 1861, when southern canons had fired upon Fort Sumter, and war came upon the south and Jefferson Davis.

     That evening after his inauguration, Davis wrote to his wife, Varina, and said,

     “The audience was large and brilliant. Upon my weary heart were showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers; but beyond them, I saw troubles and thorns innumerable. 

     “We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by a powerful opposition; but I do not despond, and will not shrink from the task imposed upon me. As soon as I can call an hour my own, I will look for a house and write you more fully.”

     Three years later, on May 5, 1865, Jefferson Davis met with his cabinet in Georgia and dissolved the Confederate government. He had no more troops or cannons to advance the fight.

     Secession had not proved the panacea that the southern states had anticipated, had hoped for. 

    Instead, it ushered into their towns and cities an unimaginable and vicious war, incredible destruction of property, immense bloodshed, and thousands of deaths of young southern boys.

    Between November 6, 1860, and November 5, 2024, lies 164 years of relative peace between the states. No civil wars. Yet, today there is no shortage of opinion writers who warn readers and caution the wiser sorts that the potential for strife exists, and it is alarming.

     In the “New York Review of Books,” dated November 7, 2024, two writers—Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson—wrote the following.

     “Two years ago, when the U.S. was still convulsed by January 6, we suggested that the possibility of spiraling violence verging on civil war warranted serious consideration. It remains imprudent to dismiss it. MAGA fever has hardly broken.”

     “Today the U.S. political situation radiates civil instability.”

     “Many Republicans refuse to see January 6 even as a contravention of American constitutional democracy, let alone as an insurrection, characterizing it as as exercise of free speech that got a little out of hand.”

     “The rhetoric of his campaign has been grossly autocratic and anti-constitutional, and he has demonstrated clear intent to rally willing Republican state election officials to refuse to certify the vote.”

     When I wrote this column on Sunday, November 3, I did not know the election’s outcome.

     When you, my friends and readers, read these words, the American electorate may have voted into the Oval Office either a former President, or the current Vice-President.

     Secession fever in 1860-1861, and MAGA fever in 2024.

     I take hope that someday in the future MAGA fever will break. Maybe not now but someday.