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[Crassus' troops] left behind twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost [to the Parthians]. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.

After a bitter exile of eighteen months Cicero had returned to Rome.

The Catiline Conspiracy

For Cicero...could penetrate to the heart of the mania for fishponds. It spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome's public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one's ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man's flight threatened the entire line of battle.

What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the "Cursus." This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves...In the Republic sports were political and politics was a sport.

It was an irony that shadowed the entire program of his reforms. Sulla's task as dictator was to ensure that in the future no one would ever again do as he had done and lead an army on Rome. Yet it is doubtful whether Sulla himself would have regarded this as a paradox.

Most gratifying of all to Sulla's sense of humor was the wholesale looting of Athenian libraries, which were stripped of their holdings. Henceforward, if anyone wanted to study Aristotle, he would have to do so in Rome. Sulla's revenge on Athenian philosophy was sweet.

"The Romans themselves," a Greek analyst observed, "find it impossible to state for sure whether the system is an aristocracy, a democracy, or a monarchy."

Sounds awfully familiar.

A city-a free city- was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas-citizenship- was to be civilized, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide.

And yet-we flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are also, for good or ill, the heirs of the Roman Republic. Had the title not already been taken, I would have called this book Citizens-for they are its protagonists, and the tragedy of the Republic's collapse is theirs.

So since Tolkien was a genius, he wrote a story which could, theoretically, serve as Beowulf's folktale source. And then he put it in Old English. þa wæs on þære tide sum swiþe sundhwæt cempa Breca hatte, Brandinga cynnes. Se Breca gemette þone cniht Beowulf be þam strande, þa he æt sume cierre com fram sunde be þam særiman.

So apparently, Beowulf is older than our surviving Scandinavian and German sources for Old Norse mythology and folklore. Tolkien, in fact, makes the argument that Odin's emergence as chief of the Norse pantheon happened after Beowulf was composed. Mind. Blown.

Proof it's time to finally read Stephen King. Today's opera was Dolores Claibourne.

Old English is intimidating.

Now that I think about it, I once met someone who studied Beowulf in Old English.

Analyzing Beowulf in both Historical and Legendary contexts.

That moment when a line of Middle English is dropped into the commentary for comparative purposes and you do a happy dance because, next to the Old English, it looks like a letter from grandma.

I'm going to cease doing text updates at this point because I'm into Tolkien's lecture notes and I am way to lazy to teach my computer to type Anglo-Saxon.