“Piss off.”

My Russian wife used those words to end a phone call with her boss a few years ago.

Silence on the other end, and then “Pardon me?”

Yikes. “Peace out,” she corrected herself.

Katya is fluent in English, but American idioms are a minefield.

Blame Brezhnev. She grew up in the Soviet Union speaking only Russian... which has one vowel where English has two.

Her ear insists “peace” and “piss” are the same word. Tomayto, tomahto.

Her boss had one second to decide whether he’d been insulted.

A former slave named Epictetus had a one-sentence rule for that second, and the rule works on any insult, intended or not.

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Epictetus: the listener finishes the insult

Epictetus had a rough life.

He was born a slave around 50 AD in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey. His owner in Rome was Epaphroditus, Nero’s secretary. He limped for decades on a lame leg.

After his release, he taught Stoic philosophy in Rome until around 93 AD. Emperor Domitian expelled every philosopher from Italy.

Epictetus made lemonade out of lemons. Crossed the sea to Nicopolis, a harbor town on Greece’s west coast that Augustus built to celebrate defeating Antony and Cleopatra, and opened a school.

He taught for the rest of his life in a house with a straw mat for a bed and a clay lamp for light. Simplicius, a later writer, says the door never needed a lock because nothing inside was worth stealing.

He left the writing to somebody else. A student named Arrian took notes and boiled them into a short handbook. Entry 20 is about insults.

A curse or a slap becomes an insult only when you decide it is. “It is your own opinion which provokes you,” he told his students.

Epictetus’s idea is easy to accept when the insult was an accident. It’s a harder sell when somebody spits in your face.

Cato wiped off spit and the insult

Cato the Younger was mid-argument in a Roman court. His opponent, a hothead named Lentulus, worked up all the phlegm he could... and spat an artistic loogie onto Cato’s forehead.

Translators not required. Cato wiped his face and said, “I’ll tell everyone, Lentulus, that they’re wrong when they say you have no mouth.”

In Latin, “mouth” also means “nerve.” Stoic writer Seneca liked the story so much he included it in his essay On Anger.

Cato followed Epictetus’s rule, without knowing it, with spit on his forehead. Epictetus wouldn’t be born for another 100 years.

People were still mishearing each other 2,000 years later. By then the stakes were hydrogen bombs.

A misread Russian idiom alarmed America

November 18, 1956. Nikita Khrushchev was lecturing a room of Western ambassadors at a tony party at the Polish embassy in Moscow. His tanks had crushed the Hungarian uprising two weeks earlier.

History was on the Soviet side, he told them. “My vas pokhoronim.” His interpreter translated the phrase word for word: “We will bury you.”

A Russian speaker hears “we’ll be at your funeral.” Khrushchev was bragging that communism would outlive capitalism.

Americans heard a death threat from a man with about 400 nuclear weapons and a newly tested hydrogen bomb 100 times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

Nobody buried anyone.

The Soviet Union hung the “Going Out of Business, Everything Must Go” sign in 1991.

Epictetus could have cleared up the kerfuffle in one second with one rule…

Read more

Dear subscribers, today’s history is my own. This is why Past Passport exists.

Nobody wins a political argument online.

Ask me how I know, friends. Tried for 10 years, 11 months, and 4 days.

I’m 0-47,904, at last count.

I opened my X account in 2021 with one topic: politics. An angry headline, a controversial take, then a pointless argument with strangers. And an insult or three.

Time for a confession.

I was a loser doomscroller. 100%.

I walked my faithful yellow Lab, Butterbean, every sunny Texas morning. Enjoying my pup and the day? Nah.

Thinking up the banger reply to that Crazy Guy online. “Now I’ve got him!”

Then I walked home, sat back down in my black mesh computer chair, cracked my knuckles, and typed with fury.

Another banger for the Crazy Guy with 27 followers ranting about COVID-19 or abortion. Really?

Dumb and dumber.

I played the loser doom scroll game for 2.5 presidential administrations.

Let’s add up the scorecard as of January 17, 2026, friends and neighbors:

• X followers: 1,525

• Substack subscribers: 0

• Minds changed: 0

• Mental energy left: 0

• Anxiety: 11 out of 10

• Books and articles finished: 0

• Money made from creative writing: Big fat $0.00

Something needed to change.

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Get my free week now.

The day I ran the numbers

January 17, I was in this very chair, posting politics. Addicted to the dopamine hit from confrontation and argument. But it somehow depressed me too.

Sound familiar?

Stopped. Reviewed the bold numbers under my X name.

It hit me.

“The hell am I doing?”

Tough love moment. Nothing.

Doomscrolling like any online schmuck with 24 followers in his mom’s basement eating cherry Pop-Tarts from the Piggly Wiggly.

My mental energy showed it. Cratered. Anxiety soared about tomorrow and the years ahead. Every new headline angered me. Made me think the worst was to come.

And here is what sucked the most:

I couldn’t think of one thing worth writing about.

Felt like my brain had been sucked of every drop of creativity by a septic tank truck from Social Media, Inc., driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s mom.

If you’re a writer, this is the worst in life. Rock bottom. Trapped in a circular cluster F of anger, uncertainty, and creative cul-de-sac.

“If I’m not a writer, what the hell am I?”

But a change was afoot.

How I rebuilt my X account and started my Substack

I nuked my old X account the next morning.

Nothing dramatic.

No band played. No announcer made the heroic call. The sun didn’t break through storm clouds.

Just sat in my creaking black mesh chair, Coke Zero 10 inches from my left hand at the PC. Like any day.

Then I clicked Edit Profile in the top right on X.

I deleted my anonymous political handle. Then I typed:

Joseph Pickett @Pastpassport.

Why history?

Always been interested. Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1996. Blew my gourd. Still got the dog-eared yellow copy in the downstairs book cabinet.

Also have a pile of books on the Civil War, the Roman Republic and Empire, ancient Greece, the Renaissance. World War I.

A new X brand was going to end my transformation out of online politics.

Then I remembered: Substack.

Writing short posts on X is one thing, but full history articles felt right to me.

Opened Past Passport on Substack. Done and done.

What I noticed after 4 days

I banged out history posts and started writing 4 Substack essays that week.

One about the day I stood in Olympia, Greece, and ran the original stadium. Not naked and oiled like the Greeks, though.

One about the gouges in the Pantheon doors. Weren’t very good, honestly. I review them now, and I cringe.

But funny thing.

I noticed it lying in bed in the morning, as sunlight filtered through the southern oak branches and through my shades...

My mind was popping with ideas.

What was this here?

It was a creative firehose turned up to 11.

Literally ran to the computer. Banged out 7 or 8 story ideas. And a very rough draft of new chapters to my book.

The heck was going on?

Simple.

I’d quit consuming and started creating. Psychologists in New Zealand had 658 people keep a diary for 13 days. The day after they created something, their energy and enthusiasm climbed.

And the ideas in bed, with faithful Butterbean snoring to my right?

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara found something fascinating... creative ideas show up when the mind is free to wander.

Mine hadn’t wandered in years. My mind was occupied with drafting the banger for Crazy Guy. Reacting, not acting.

Bottom line after a few days: My creativity soared. Three or four essays weekly. Daily X posts.

After eight months, the scorecard, my friends:

• X followers: 18,297

• Substack subscribers: 580

• Paid subscribers: 32

Am I there yet? Hell no. Not by a long chalk.

Just starting the Ironman journey to a successful Substack and X account.

But now I’m on a mission.

A mission I developed while studying and writing about history and leaving the doom scroll as dead as Julius Caesar (may he rest in peace).

Every problem we have has been here before

I was gobsmacked as I researched and wrote Past Passport in the early days. January and February, seems like 100 years ago.

Something I knew intuitively before, but now I saw the overwhelming evidence in the big-ass books piled on my desk. Herodotus. Thucydides. Caesar’s Gallic War.

Almost every problem we have today, in politics, the economy, and the world, has happened before.

100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,700 years ago.

Consider….

Around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that he wished he’d been born in any age but his own. He called it the age of iron, nothing but labor and sorrow.

The Persians burned Athens to the ground in 480 BC, temples and all. Thirty-three years later, the Athenians started building the Parthenon on the same rock.

Rome thought it was wiped out after Cannae in 216 BC. It had nearly 700 more years.

The plague killed about half of Florence in 1348. Within a century, the survivors’ grandchildren were raising Brunelleschi’s dome.

In 1992, in the library in Ironton, Ohio, I was researching the 1937 flood and found a Depression-era editorial pining for the good old days.

Every generation was sure it was the last one. Convinced it was the worst, and everything was finished. Nope.

Has the world changed? Sure.

Technology, medicine, science. Human beings haven’t, though. We face the same emotions and the same limits our ancestors did. The same possibilities too.

The future is brighter than your phone lies

Then, one afternoon in March, a ray of sun hit me, literally, through the oak branches out front.

The future is brighter than a lot of us think.

Our brains get consumed by the negative doom-scroll porn in our hands every morning.

Social media is rigged that way. Get you addicted to the dopamine hit. Come back again and again. Argue pointlessly. Buy shit. Feel depressed and worthless.

Rinse. Repeat.

I see it online all day: the mind-numbing doom-and-gloom cycle.

In a survey of 10,000 young people in ten countries, 56% said humanity is doomed because of climate change. Three out of four said the future is frightening.

I blame the phone. That’s social media taking an iron wrecking ball to people’s minds with negative doom porn. In the most advanced, most blessed time in human history.

Meanwhile, look at where we are next to where we were 100 or 2,000 years ago. Our ancestors dealt with things vastly worse than what we deal with today.

We just need to put on our big boy pants, set down the phone, stop consuming, and start creating.

My mission today

My friends, the mission:

Reassure people about the future with history and art. Dive into the history, beauty, and culture our ancestors left us.

Dread the news less, learn what the legend omitted, get old answers to new problems. Screw the doom scroll, Social Media, Inc. and the horse it rode in on.

Rome thought it was hosed after Cannae. It lived almost 700 more years. That’s the history I write.

It’s all there in the massive history books. Somebody already had your problem in spades. Somebody already solved it. And they wrote it down. Maybe on papyrus that had to be recopied every 24 years, but it’s there if you read it.

Are you ready?

Sure, life still sucks sometimes. I’m not that far gone.

I still complain about my son getting T-boned, and I bitch about the property taxes in Texas. But I do it Stoic style, like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would.

Marcus wrote a note to himself about 1,850 years ago:

You gotta zoom out and see the big, beautiful picture, guys.

We can handle this. Our ancestors did it, and we can too.

Subscribe if you want more peace about the future, to avoid doom-scroll depression, and to discover old answers to your problems.

Join me.

I put down the black rectangle that was selling me negative nonsense. You can too.

Life is good. Amazing, really.

And the future? Bright. And the past proves it. We got this.

Follow me for three essays a week against the doom scroll. Subscribe at pastpassport.com. I’ll even toss you a 7-day free trial:

Get my free week now

God bless.

Joseph@pastpassport.com

Follow me on X: @pastpassport

Every politician promises to fix the roads. Around 66 BC, Julius Caesar did it and paid for the work himself with borrowed money.

He was buying votes. Politicians always have, and you can still stand on Caesar’s first purchase at Rome’s southern edge.

Walk the Appian Way today, and you’re stepping on lava. The dark stones were cut from a 277,000-year-old lava flow, worn smooth by twenty centuries of feet and wheels.

In the late afternoon, the sun filters through the umbrella pines and the gray road runs straight until it fades from view... 350 miles to the heel of Italy.

Rome started building the Appian Way in 312 BC, and it was about 250 years old when Caesar took charge of road maintenance.

Here’s how a man buried in debt bought Rome’s loyalty, starting with its most famous road...

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Caesar started out neck-deep in debt

Before the road, there was the debt, and it was a ton. More than 30 tons, if you counted it out in silver coin.

Plutarch gives the figure: “before Caesar entered upon any public office he was thirteen hundred talents in debt.”

A Roman soldier would have needed about 69,000 years of pay to cover it.

He had an old family name and not much money behind it. At 18 he had refused the dictator Sulla’s order to divorce his wife, and it cost him her dowry and his inheritance.

Every office in Rome was won by vote, so he borrowed and spent where voters could see it.

You’d call that reckless, and his rivals did too. They expected his popularity to wither when the loans ran out.

Then Caesar found something bigger to spend on.

He fixed the Appian Way on borrowed money

The Appian Way today.

A young, ambitious Julius Caesar looked at the Appian Way in 66 BC and saw an opportunity. He wanted a name for himself, so he took charge of the road and seized on an idea any politician might: fix the roads.

He paid for the repairs himself, with more borrowed money. Plutarch doesn’t say what he fixed, only that it cost a fortune.

It was a grim road to put your name on. Five years before, it had been lined with dying men.

Crassus had crucified 6,000 of Spartacus’s men along it... a cross about every 35 yards, for 120 miles from Capua to Rome.

Caesar gave people a new reason to think about it. Farmers hauled their crops to market on those dark stones, and the legions marched south on them in hobnailed boots. Now every one of them traveled on Caesar’s money.

Buying voters like this was legal, and Rome expected ambitious men to spend on the public.

Who forgets the guy who fixed their road?

His rivals still thought he was throwing money away, and the road was the cheap part….

Read more

The parking space 250 Roman paces from the entrance, waiting until the last person is served before getting in line... boarding the plane 5 minutes before departure to avoid the masses.

That’s the introvert’s life. Maybe you know one.

That’s me.

The mob of bodies and cell phones crowded around the Mona Lisa, a zoomed-in photo or two... high time this introvert darted in the other direction.

Three corners later, the Venus de Milo and I were alone in her hall. Save for the cleaning woman with squeaky shoes.

Nine million people visited the Louvre last year. About 20,000 a day head straight for the Mona Lisa. By the museum’s own count, each one looks at her for about 50 seconds.

Some leave after getting their snap with the once-stolen masterpiece. Maybe you were one of them. No judgment here.

The Venus de Milo and some 35,000 other works play second banana. Good news for those who shun the crowd and crave solitude to soak in the details.

Seneca’s friend Lucilius once asked him what to avoid above all. The answer came back in one Latin word: turbam, the crowd. Later in the same letter, he gave the second half:

A nearly empty room with one statue in it is a good place to give this philosophy a shot.

Here’s the story of the statue the crowd walked away from, and what you see when you finally have her to yourself.

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Venus owned the crowd for 90 years

April 8, 1820. A Greek farmer on the island of Melos uncovered the top half of a mysterious marble woman.

Olivier Voutier, a French sailor and amateur archaeologist, was standing close enough to see it. He urged the farmer to keep digging.

They pulled Venus out of a stone niche in pieces. Two big ones and a smaller third, plus a chunk of arm and a hand holding an apple.

She wasn’t alone in the island soil. Two carved pillars called herms rose from the ground with her, and Voutier sketched the whole lineup then and there.

A year hence, she belonged to the king of France. The Marquis de Rivière gave her to Louis XVIII, and Louis handed her to the Louvre in March 1821.

France needed her. Badly.

Napoleon had hauled the Medici Venus home from Italy as booty. In 1815, with Napoleon over and done, France had to return it.

Now here came the perfect replacement goddess, straight from a rocky Greek field.

So the French did what you’d do. They told everyone the Venus de Milo was the New and Improved sculpture you had to see.

Worked impeccably.

Berlin’s academy had a plaster cast of her by 1822, and the Brits gave another cast the best spot in the Crystal Palace’s Greek court. More than 70 poems have been penned about her.

I’d always figured she was famous for being beautiful. True, but she had a hell of a publicist, too.

The Mona Lisa hung in the same building through it all. As late as 1911, Mona was far from the most visited object in the Louvre... you could have stood in front of Leonardo with nobody’s bad breath in your nostrils.

That changed on a Monday in August 1911. Hold that thought.

Alone with her, you stop noticing the arms

She’s bigger than you expect. Six foot eight on top of a pedestal, so you crane your neck the whole visit.

The room is red marble from Napoleon’s day, and it’s all hers.

The Mona Lisa crowd is still out there. You can hear it a few turns back, a low murmur, like a party in an apartment 8 units down the hall.

In here, the only sound is the cleaning woman’s shoes squeaking in the corner as she works her broom.

In photos, the first thing you see is what’s missing. No arms. It’s The Brand, after all.

You start noticing what’s there….

Read more

This is ancient Carthage. Almost none of it is Carthaginian.

Nearly every ancient column and every brick you see above is Roman. Rome crushed its nemesis on the coast (now Tunisia) so decisively that it built a new city on top of the old.

(The story that Rome salted the earth is a myth, though. - ed.)

For nearly 500 years, Rome had no king. It was a Republic: two elected consuls who served one year each and a Senate of former officeholders.

The rule was that no single man should hold power for long.

In 146 BC, that system ruled Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Spanish coast. With Carthage gone, no other power in the Mediterranean could match it.

The Republic was at its mightiest.

Yet less than a century later, one man ruled Rome, and the Republic was dead.

The end began in 146 BC.

Rome’s general Scipio Aemilianus watched Carthage burn. He had won, and he wept.

Beside him stood Polybius, a Greek historian, who heard him quote Homer on the fall of Troy and say that Rome would have the same day. Scipio couldn’t say how. Polybius could.

Why did the Roman Republic start to fail right after its greatest victory?

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A senator argued Rome needed its enemy alive

Carthage lost its empire to Rome for good at Zama in 202 BC. The terms left it ten warships and a bill for 10,000 talents, to be paid over fifty years. Carthage also couldn’t make war without Rome’s permission.

The Roman historian Livy says the Carthaginians offered in 191 to pay the whole debt at once, and the Senate turned the money down. By the 150s the city was rich again.

The senator Cato went to Carthage on an embassy in 152 and came home rattled. Later writers say he ended every speech with Carthago delenda est:

The writer Pliny the Elder adds that he held up a fresh fig in the Senate. Said it was picked in Carthage three days earlier.

A senator named Scipio Nasica took the other side. Plutarch says he closed his own speeches with the opposite line, that Carthage should be left standing.

His argument wasn’t mercy.

Later writers say he thought fear of Carthage kept Romans disciplined. That a Rome with no rival would turn on itself.

No transcript of either man’s speeches survives. Plutarch and Appian wrote 250 to 300 years afterward.

Would you have voted to keep your biggest rival alive?

Rome didn’t.

In 150, after years of losing land to its neighbor Masinissa, king of Numidia, while Roman arbiters sided with him, Carthage fought back without Rome’s permission.

Rome called it a breach of the treaty and declared war the next year. Cato died that same year, 149, with the city he wanted gone still standing.

The siege lasted three years. In the spring of 146, Roman troops broke into the city.

Victory is often when trouble starts

Polybius said it best. A state that survives great dangers and reaches uncontested supremacy, he argued, gets used to prosperity. Men fight too hard over public office.

Stirred up by grievances and flattery, the people demand the lion’s share for themselves. The state keeps the finest names, freedom and democracy, and becomes mob rule (Book 6).

He described how successful states generally decay. Readers have applied it to Rome ever since.

A century later, the historian Sallust gave the idea a Roman name: metus hostilis, fear of the enemy. Before Carthage fell, he says, the Senate and people governed with moderation, and fear of an outside enemy kept citizens decent to each other.

Once the fear lifted, arrogance and appetite moved in. In Catiline, he puts it more darkly: with Carthage destroyed at the root, Fortune began to rage and throw everything into confusion.

With no rival gathering outside the walls, Romans found one inside.

Modern groups follow the same pattern. Companies that corner their market and teams that win too long can drift the same way.

Microsoft had smacked around every rival in desktop software by the early 2000s. Kurt Eichenwald reported in Vanity Fair that its divisions spent the next decade fighting each other, fueled by a ranking system that pitted coworker against coworker.

The Lakers won three straight titles, and then Shaq and Kobe spent their energy on each other until Shaq was traded in 2004. If you’ve worked anywhere that finally beat its biggest competitor, you probably know the drill.

Success eases the pressure that kept people pulling together, and the energy turns inward to status and turf.

Romans dated the decline to four different years

Romans argued for a century over when the rot set in.

187 BC. Manlius Vulso’s army comes home from Asia with bronze couches, fine tables, and dancing girls. Livy says that’s where Rome learned luxury. He wrote 160 years later.

168 BC. Rome breaks Macedon at Pydna. Young Romans come back from Greece wanting boys, courtesans, and banquets. Polybius saw it and wrote it down.

154 BC. Piso says public modesty died here. He was consul in 133, the year Gracchus was clubbed. We have him only through Pliny the Elder.

146 BC. Carthage burns. Sallust says the fear ended and ambition ran loose.

Take your pick.

Cato already had a bad feeling about the new luxury coming home from the eastern wars. As censor in 184, the official in charge of public morals, he taxed fine carriages and expensive slave boys at ten times their value (Plutarch, Cato the Elder 18).

Three of the four dates came after Cato had already sounded the alarm.

Sallust blamed the loss of fear. Historians add that farmland fell into a few hands and that soldiers were loyal to their generals.

In 133 BC, the argument moved from the Senate floor to the street.

This is the kind of history I cover at Past Passport: the questions you’d ask, no dissertations. The rest, from the murder of a tribune to Augustus, is below.

Read more

Leo Tolstoy wanted to kill himself.

He was not yet 50, and he was loaded and famous.

The huge estate, the loyal wife, the house full of children, and two of the greatest novels ever written.

Yet the great Tolstoy hid a rope from himself and stopped carrying a gun. Afraid he’s use them.

Money and fame bought him nothing. He wrote it all down in his book, A Confession.

I didn’t know Tolstoy’s story when I first read him at 21, in a rented cottage on an island in Canada. No electricity. Fishing by day, board games and a pile of books at night.

CBC radio down low. Gas lights hissed overhead, too dim to read by.

I knew only he was a Famous Writer when I pulled a yellowed copy of Anna Karenina off the mantel. It smelled of mildew and wood smoke.

Lay on a red leather sofa and read it by an Eveready lantern poised on my sternum. And read.

A 19th-century Russian love story had no business being a page-turner for a college kid from Ohio in 1991. Read all 239 chapters in a week.

The kid was no dummy. In 2007, 125 authors ranked the 10 greatest books of all time. Anna Karenina came first. War and Peace came third, and Hamlet finished sixth.

I left the island with a handful of fish pictures and a permanent love of Tolstoy.

Four lessons came with me in the boat. It took me 30 years to notice them. They'll take you 10 minutes.

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Getting it all isn’t enough

Just need to get that big promotion. I’ll be set when I’m making $250,000. I’ll be good for life in the massive house with the swimming pool.

You’ve said it. I’ve said it. Count Vronsky said it too, about a woman.

He’s the cavalry officer who chases Anna Karenina, another man’s wife, through the first half of the book. He gets the girl. He quits the army, and they run off to Italy.

It should be a happy ending. But the glow fades fast.

Tolstoy writes:

Boredom sets in. With nothing left to chase, he starts wishing he had something to want. Tolstoy’s phrase for it: “a desire for desires.” The chase had been the best part.

The man has 16 hours a day to fill, so he tries politics and new books, then dabbles with painting.

You know this man. Today he buys a boat... then a bigger boat. Then a yacht.

Tolstoy knew him too. He saw him in the mirror every day.

While he wrote those chapters, he was busy with his estate in Samara. In A Confession, he describes the thought that kept interrupting: you’ll have 16,000 acres and 300 horses, “and what then?”

He looked at fame like that. Say he became more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Molière. Then what?

He had no answer, and that’s where the rope comes in.

He lived another 30 years.

What kept him going was already in his own novel: a hayfield, and a tool most of us have never held, but should…

Read more

You're standing on the waterfront in Alexandria, Egypt's capital, with the Pharos lighthouse towering over the harbor behind you.

A Greek schoolteacher pushes through the crowd with a gift from the king.

Inside is the severed head of Rome’s most famous general.

It was 48 BC. Julius Caesar was the man on the waterfront, and eight weeks earlier he had crushed Pompey the Great at Pharsalus. The Egyptians expected gratitude.

He wasn’t.

Then they pressed Pompey’s signet ring into his hand, carved with a lion gripping a sword. Plutarch tells us that Caesar wept.

Most retellings make this Caesar's kill. The sources don't.

When Pompey died, Caesar was still at sea, a few days behind him. He had spent the war pardoning his enemies. In a letter Cicero preserved, he called mercy “a new way of winning.”

The men who sent that head thought they were giving Caesar what he wanted. Within six years, the boy king of Egypt and all three men who ran his council were in the ground.

None of them died of natural causes.

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A schoolteacher sentenced Pompey to death

Caesar and Pompey had once been partners, and Pompey married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. After she died in 54 BC, the partnership disintegrated. By August of 48 BC, they faced each other at Pharsalus, in central Greece.

By Caesar’s own count, Pompey had 45,000 infantry to his 22,000 (and Caesar had every reason to round up). Caesar broke that army in an afternoon.

Pompey ripped off his general’s insignia and rode out the back gate of his camp.

He picked up his wife, Cornelia, on Lesbos. Plutarch says that when the messenger told her, she dropped to the ground speechless. She had been expecting a victor.

Pompey sailed for Egypt, and he had reason to think Egypt owed him. In 58 BC, its king, Ptolemy XII, had been thrown out by his own people.

He fled to Rome and moved into Pompey’s villa in the Alban Hills. Three years later, with Pompey’s backing, a Roman army put him back on the throne.

That king was dead now. His son, Ptolemy XIII, was about 13 and at war with his own sister, Cleopatra. Pompey dropped anchor off Pelusium, where the boy’s army was camped along the beach, and asked for shelter.

You don’t let a 13-year-old decide what to do with the most famous general in the Roman world. His council decided.

Pothinus, a eunuch, controlled the palace, and Achillas commanded the army. The third seat went to Theodotus of Chios, the boy’s paid rhetoric teacher. Plutarch says he got it because the council lacked better men.

Some of the council said to take Pompey in. Some said to send him away. Theodotus said both were mistakes.

Take Pompey in, and Caesar becomes your enemy. Send him away, and Pompey blames you for his ruin while Caesar blames you for letting him go. The third option was to invite him ashore and kill him.

Plutarch says Theodotus smiled when he delivered the line that settled it:

Nekros ou daknei.

Dead men don’t bite.

The council sided with the schoolteacher. Pompey the Great, who had ridden through Rome in three triumphs, was a dead man before his boat touched sand.

Pompey knew the man who stabbed him

The Egyptians rowed a tiny boat out to Pompey’s ship.

Achillas was there. So was Lucius Septimius, a Roman officer who had once served under Pompey. Septimius had stayed in Egypt with the Roman garrison left behind after Ptolemy XII regained his throne. Now he worked for the son.

Achillas called up to Pompey in Greek and invited him down. The water was too shallow for a warship, he said.

Cornelia had a bad feeling. The boat was too small and too few people had come, and along the shore Egyptian warships were filling with men.

Pompey went anyway. Before he climbed down, he turned to Cornelia and quoted Sophocles:

In the boat, Pompey looked at Septimius and asked if they hadn’t served together once. Septimius nodded and said nothing.

Nobody else spoke either. The oars dipped and pulled for a long way, and Pompey unrolled a short speech he’d written in Greek for the young king and read it over to himself.

From the ship, Cornelia watched the boat nose into the shallows. A crowd from the king’s court had gathered on the sand to greet him. She started to relax, and if you’d been on that deck, you would have too.

Pompey’s freedman, Philip, took his hand to help him stand.

Septimius drove his sword into Pompey’s back. Then Salvius, a centurion, drew his dagger, and so did Achillas.

Pompey pulled his toga over his face with both hands. Plutarch says he groaned and said nothing else.

Cornelia’s scream rang across the water. Her ships hauled up their anchors and fled.

The Egyptians sawed off Pompey’s head and left his body naked on the sand. The head was for Caesar.

After the crowd drifted off, Philip washed the body in seawater and wrapped it in his own tunic. An old Roman who had fought in Pompey’s first campaigns came down the beach to help. The two of them gathered the rotten planks of a wrecked fishing boat and burned Pompey where he lay.

Pompey the Great had been one of the richest men in the world. His funeral pyre was a broken fishing boat.

Three men share the blame. A Roman he once commanded held the sword, and a schoolteacher talked the council into it. The order itself went out in the name of a 13-year-old boy.

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Taylor Swift pointed at her wedding ring and its estimated 8-carat diamond during the Chiefs game this week. 24 million people watched it live.

We do history here, so I asked: why the left? In Russia, the wedding ring goes on the right. Same across most of Eastern Europe.

Your wedding ring is on the left for a nerve that doesn't exist.

Around 170 AD, the Roman writer Aulus Gellius explained why his people wore their rings on the fourth finger of the left hand.

Egyptian embalmers, he wrote, had dissected bodies and found a fine nerve running from that finger straight to the heart. Romans didn’t dissect human bodies, so no one in Rome could check.

No one has ever found the nerve, and 1,850 years of weddings haven't moved the ring.

A bishop turned that fictitious nerve into a vein, and the Church of England wrote it into the wedding vows that came to America. Russia put the ring on the right hand for a different reason.

The route from an Egyptian embalming table to Taylor Swift’s left hand, and yours, starts at a Roman dinner party 260 years after Gellius.

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Rome heard a better reason and ignored it

Around 431 AD, a Roman official named Macrobius wrote the Saturnalia, a long dialogue set at dinner parties over the December holiday.

One guest asks about the ring finger. The doctor at the table repeats the Egyptian nerve story, and a guest from Egypt adds that priests in his country anoint that finger with perfume at the altar.

The wrong anatomy lesson Gellius wrote down around 170 AD was still being repeated in the 400s.

Macrobius also records a plainer reason, from the jurist Ateius Capito. The left hand works less, so a ring worn there takes fewer knocks, and the fourth finger kept the stone safest.

Capito’s answer was sensible, but history forgot it.

The nerve made a better story over dinner.

If anyone at your wedding told you that finger connects to the heart, the claim had already been dinner talk for 1,600 years.

45 years after Macrobius wrote, the Western Empire was gone. The nerve story outlived it.

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Paris or Rome for a winter vacation? It was the second-longest-running argument in our marriage.

Two months later, as I paced through Notre-Dame, I checked my watch; the place felt about 1,200 years too young for a Rome guy.

Turns out she was right, though not for the reasons she thought.

Under the cathedral square lies a crypt of Roman Paris going back to the first century A.D., and across the square, under a hospital, was something older.

This week, France’s Ministry of Culture announced that archaeologists may have found Lutetia, the Celtic town Caesar’s army came to take.

In the hospital’s courtyard, they uncovered 65 feet of its wall, the stones blackened by fire and the beams burned to charcoal.

Caesar wrote that Lutetia stood on an island in the Seine, and that when Rome closed in, the Gauls burned it and cut the bridges. Historians read that with one eyebrow raised for 2,000 years.

“The enemy... ordered Lutetia to be burned and the bridges of that town to be cut down.”
Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, Book VII, 52 B.C.

The wall is on that island, the same one Notre-Dame stands on, and it burned.

So on this one, Caesar was telling the truth. How Lutetia ended up in flames is a cracking story.

Much better than anything he polished up about himself for posterity.

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Caesar hired himself as his press agent

Caesar was the best general of his age and a hell of a PR man. For most of the Gallic War, he’s our only witness. Nobody else’s account survives to check him against.

He wrote The Gallic War himself, in the third person, and sent it home to the Roman voters paying for his campaigns.

The third person was smart thinking. “Caesar” crosses rivers and wins battles, and you almost forget the man writing it is the same man being praised.

Historians have been checking him ever since, and he doesn’t always pass. In 55 B.C., he claimed two German tribes numbered 430,000 and that he wiped them out without losing a man.

He’d attacked while their envoys were in his camp for peace talks, and back in Rome, Cato the Younger suggested handing Caesar over to the Germans to make amends.

At Gergovia, the one battle he lost in person, Caesar blamed his soldiers. Even his own officer, Asinius Pollio, said Caesar’s memory had a way of burnishing his record.

In his Brutus, Cicero praised the books as plain and unadorned, like a statue with the clothes taken off. That plainness is what makes them so persuasive. Caesar reads like a man with nothing to hide.

That’s why the recently uncovered charred wall is significant.

The burning of Lutetia earns Caesar nothing. He wasn’t there, and the Gauls torched the town before his army could take it. A PR man gains nothing from a story like that, so there’s no reason to invent it.

He wrote it down in Gallic Wars for one reason: it happened.

If you’ve ever wondered how much of Caesar to believe, start there. The parts where he had nothing to gain by lying are the parts most worth trusting. Carbon dating puts the wall’s timber between 200 and 10 B.C., and the team is still testing, but a dig in Paris has now backed up one of those parts.

Here’s how it happened.

Caesar was two hundred miles away

Spring, 52 B.C. All of Gaul rose behind a young Arvernian chief named Vercingetorix.

Caesar marched six legions south to besiege him at Gergovia. The other four went north with his best lieutenant, Titus Labienus, who had orders to crush the tribes along the Seine.

Labienus dropped his baggage at Agedincum, modern Sens, and marched downriver toward Lutetia. The Gauls gave their army to Camulogenus, an old Aulerci chief. Caesar says he was worn out with age but won the command anyway, because nobody in Gaul knew war better.

Camulogenus camped behind a marsh draining into the Seine and dared the Romans to try crossing it. Labienus gave it a shot. His men laid wicker hurdles in the mud and packed earth on top to build a causeway, and the marsh swallowed every bit.

So Labienus did an end-around. He marched back upriver in the dark to Metiosedum, modern Melun, seized about fifty boats and crossed the Seine. Then he came down the far bank toward Lutetia, from the side nobody was guarding.

The Parisii, the tribe that would one day give Paris its name, saw him coming.

They couldn’t hold the island, and they refused to hand a walled town in the middle of the river to a Roman army. So, the Parisii set fire to Lutetia and cut its bridges.

The fire bought them one night in the rain

Burning Lutetia didn’t save the Parisii. It did strand Labienus.

Then the bad news arrived.

Caesar had failed at Gergovia, and the Aedui, Rome’s oldest allies in Gaul, had joined the revolt. Labienus had four legions on the wrong side of the Seine with a Gallic army in front of him. His baggage was fifty miles back at Sens. He had to cross the river without fighting in the water.

He crossed at night.

Five cohorts marched upstream, making as much noise as they could, dragging small boats behind them. The rest of the army boarded the Melun boats in silence and slipped four miles downstream. A storm rolled in and drowned out the oars, and the Gallic sentries missed the whole crossing.

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My wife was raised in Siberia on kilometers, kilos, and meters. She argues the mile is the most ridiculous unit of measure ever invented.

“A kilometer is 1,000 meters. Easy. A mile is... 5,280 feet. What?!”

She has lived stateside for 25 years and still can’t sense what a mile is. A Texas highway sign says the next exit is 1.5 miles away.

‘How far is that?’

She’s not alone. To metric fans worldwide, 5,280 looks like a joke made into law.

For years, she had me.

But history claps back. The mile makes more sense than its 5,280 feet suggest.

The measurement began as a Roman count of footsteps, a clean round thousand. The strange number came 1,900 years later from an English Parliament, and its reason had nothing to do with distance.

You’ve already picked a side. Metric people roll their eyes at the mile, and mile people point out that nobody ever sang about walking 804.672 kilometers. I found something that scores a point for each side.

The mile’s story starts with the word itself.

“Mile” began as a number, not a length.

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The first mile was almost metric

“Mile” derives from the Latin mille, a thousand. The Romans said mille passus, a thousand paces.

A legionary’s hobnailed sandal struck the stone, left, then right. Only the left counted. That was one pace, about 5 Roman feet, and a thousand of them made a mile... 5,000 Roman feet.

The legions trained by the mile. Around AD 400, the military writer Vegetius set the bar for recruits: 20 miles in 5 summer hours... 24 if the drill officer wanted the fast step.

That’s 20,000 left footfalls before lunch. Your step counter would read 40,000.

Each of those Roman miles ran about 1,480 meters.

That’s almost exactly 1.5 kilometers. My wife and a legionary would have agreed on the distance to within about 20 meters, no bickering or conversion charts involved.

Point to my wife. The first mile counted in thousands, same as her kilometer.

Ancient Rome carved every mile into stone

A thousand paces only helps if somebody writes the number down. Ancient Rome carved it in stone, starting on its most famous road.

In 312 BC, Appius Claudius Caecus, the censor overseeing public contracts, began a road south from Rome to Capua. Later extensions lengthened it to Brundisium, modern Brindisi, on Italy’s heel. Rome named it after him: the Via Appia, the Appian Way.

The ancient city counted distances outward from the Porta Capena, a gate in the city’s old Servian Wall. Every Roman mile was marked by a stone column with its number cut into the face.

Those columns came long after the road was laid. Plutarch, writing two centuries later, credits the reformer Gaius Gracchus with measuring the roads by the mile around 123 BC and marking each one with a stone pillar.

Say you’re on a mule cart heading south. You read your trip off the roadside, one numbered stone at a time.

The Appian Way’s first milestone survives.

A copy stands about 100 meters outside the Porta San Sebastiano. It has a big Roman numeral I near the top and an inscription honoring repairs by the emperors Vespasian in AD 76 and Nerva in AD 97.

Walk south from that copy today, and you cross the same black basalt paving peasants walked 2,000 years ago, cart ruts still cut into the stones.

The original stone was hauled up the Capitoline Hill in the 1580s and set into the balustrade of the piazza Michelangelo designed. It’s still there, and tourists saunter past without knowing what they missed.

Within a decade of that stone going up the Capitoline, Parliament in London had to decide how long a mile was.

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Caesars Head rises more than 3,200 feet above sea level in South Carolina.

Some say the rock’s profile resembles Julius Caesar.

It’s about 4,900 miles from Rome. Caesar has been dead since 44 BC.

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He laughed at his kidnappers

Most of us would be terrified if we were kidnapped.

Now imagine laughing at the men who did it.

Around 75 BC, Cilician pirates seized a young Roman named Julius Caesar at sea. They demanded 20 talents to release him.

Caesar laughed. Legendary nerve. He told them they had no idea who they had snatched. He offered 50.

Caesar spent 38 days in their camp while his companions raised the rest of the ransom.

Caesar was in charge even as a captive.

He ordered them to be quiet when he wanted to sleep. He read them his poems, and when they failed to admire them, he jeered at them as illiterate barbarians.

And he told them, often and laughing, that he would crucify them all.

The pirates took it for boyish humor.

You probably would have too.

Caesar kept his word once the ransom was paid.

He raised a fleet and caught most of them still at anchor. He crucified every one as promised.

Suetonius adds one merciful detail. Before the crucifixions, Caesar had the pirates’ throats cut.

Caesar’s nerve stayed with him.

About 25 years later, in January of 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon with one legion, roughly 5,000 men. Bringing an army over that river was treason.

Pompey, Rome’s most famous general, abandoned Italy in roughly two months, before a pitched battle.

In 47 BC, at Zela, Caesar reported his victory to a friend in three words:

“Veni, vidi, vici.”

I came, I saw, I conquered.

He made mercy a weapon

Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a Roman general who ruled Rome when Caesar was young.

He was old-school with his enemies. He killed them.

The policy was chiseled on his tomb. According to Plutarch, the epitaph boasted:

No friend ever outdid me in kindness, and no enemy ever outdid me in harm.

He meant it.

In 88 BC, he marched his army into Rome, the first Roman general to do so. He came back in 82 BC and won a civil war.

Days later, he called the Senate to a temple and began to speak.

Outside, his soldiers were killing prisoners. Plutarch says 6,000.

The senators heard the screams. Sulla told them to keep listening. Some criminals were being punished on his orders.

Plutarch says his face never changed.

Sulla posted lists of his enemies in the Forum. Anyone could kill a man on the list and collect a reward. If your name was up there, that included your neighbor.

They seized the listed man’s property. They displayed his head in the Forum.

Sulla went after a young Caesar too.

Marius and Cinna had made him a priest of Jupiter as a teenager. The job came with rules. No riding a horse. No looking at an army. It would have kept him out of politics and war.

Sulla ordered him to divorce Cinna’s daughter. Caesar refused.

He lost the priesthood and went into hiding, and Suetonius says Sulla gave in only after the Vestal Virgins and Caesar’s relatives pleaded for him.

A priest of Jupiter could never look at an army. Caesar made a career of it.

Thirty-three years later, he had his own army and faced the same choice.

At Corfinium in 49 BC, he captured the Roman commander Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and let him go.

Then he wrote to his agents Oppius and Balbus about it. Cruelty never bought a lasting victory, he said, with one exception: Sulla. Caesar wrote that he would not follow Sulla’s example.

He called mercy a new way of conquering.

Ahenobarbus went straight back to fighting.

Caesar kept pardoning anyway. Every Roman watching learned that surrendering to him was survivable. He also restored the sons of Sulla’s victims, whose rights had been stripped.

In Gaul, when severity paid, he chose severity. At Uxellodunum in 51 BC, he spared the defenders’ lives and had their hands cut off as a warning.

He used mercy as a weapon when it worked. In the civil war, it worked very well.

But some of the men he pardoned were among those who killed him.

He wrote his own history

While the war in Gaul was still being fought, Caesar wrote its story well in his Gallic War.

In the third person and in plain Latin.

In 46 BC, Cicero, who had backed Pompey against him, read Caesar’s history and called it bare and pleasing, with every ornament stripped off like clothing.

It’s how I try to write too. Fact first and no costumes.

Cicero also said anyone with sense would think twice before rewriting it.

They did think twice. Much of what we know about the Gallic War comes from Caesar himself.

He wrote as “Caesar,” and every victory reads like a report from a neutral observer. The observer was Caesar.

He puts two German tribes, the Usipetes and Tencteri, at 430,000 people and says the Romans lost no one in the final battle. Scholars still argue over those numbers.

The battle itself is real. In 2015, Dutch archaeologists announced they had found the field near Kessel: swords, spearheads, a helmet and the bones of men, women and children, dated to the first century BC.

His own war reports helped keep him remembered for two thousand years.

A worn copy of his Gallic War is on my desk.

He changed the calendar

Caesar is remembered for fixing time itself.

By 46 BC, the Roman calendar had drifted out of step with the seasons, because the priests in charge of correcting it had skipped their corrections.

Their chief was Caesar.

Caesar added 90 days to the year.

That year ran 445 days and became known as the year of confusion.

In 45 BC, the new calendar began. It had 365 days, with an extra day every fourth year.

Much of Europe used it for more than 1,600 years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII changed the leap-year rule to fix a small error. The calendar on your wall is Caesar’s, with that repair.

After his death, Rome renamed the month of his birth in his honor.

Every July, English speakers say his name. So do the French, Germans, Russians, and Greeks.

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Fahrenheit or Celsius? Beats me.

I’ve juggled both for 40 years at our Canadian cottage. Every time I cross the Peace Bridge and drive up Queen Elizabeth Way at 100 km/h (62 mph), the conversions whir in my head.

The cage match over these two scales has been waged for decades, including last July 4 in a viral post that hit 6.2 million views.

So far, it’s a split decision. But at least we have 2 major temperature scales to choose from.

The Romans had a bigger problem.

They had no scale whatsoever.

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Rome ran its baths without a thermostat

Nobody in the Roman Forum in a toga ever complained “it’s 90 degrees today.”

In ancient Rome, people described heat with words like calidus (hot) and frigidus (cold). A Roman doctor checked a fever by laying a hand on your forehead.

Your mom did the same thing when you were laid out by the flu. It's one of the oldest medical techniques still in use.

Romans built the Latin words for temperature into their bathhouses. Bathers stepped between the hot caldarium and the cold frigidarium, with the warm tepidarium in between.

Furnaces pushed hot air under the floors, and the tepidarium usually sat farther from the furnace than the caldarium. The air had cooled by the time it got there.

Your thermostat does with a single click what Roman bath engineers did by placing a room farther from the fire.

Galen counted heat in degrees

The physician Galen designed the closest thing to a temperature scale in Rome around AD 170.

He proposed a midpoint of equal parts ice and boiling water, with 4 degrees of heat above it and 4 of cold below.

Doctors used those degrees to rank medicines by their effect on the body. That way, a drug could be hot in the second degree or cold in the fourth.

The label on your pill bottle gives milligrams. Galen’s patients got “hot in the second degree.”

We don’t know if Galen ever performed the experiment himself. The idea outlived the ancient doctor by more than 1,300 years.

In the 1500s, physician Johann Hasler still built body-temperature scales from Galen’s degrees to mix medicine for his patients.

No instrument could decipher Galen’s scale until the 1600s.

The hardware on the table without numbers

Greek engineers knew that air expands when it warms.

A text credited to Philo of Byzantium, from the 3rd century BC, describes a gadget. A hollow ball with a tube running from it into a bowl of water.

Put the ball in the sun and the air inside swells and bubbles out through the water. Let it cool, and the water climbs back up the tube.

Today it’s called a thermoscope.

It shows that something got hotter or colder every time. It can’t say by how much. The tube had no scale, and nobody had thought to add one. The hardware was on the table, but the numbers came later.

Hero of Alexandria, working in the 1st century AD, put the same physics to work in temple gadgets.

A fire lit on an altar heated the air inside, which pushed water into a bucket. The bucket's weight swung the doors open. Nobody used it to measure anything.

Then the idea moldered for about 1,500 years.

Around 1600, Galileo and others built their own thermoscopes. They had a flaw. Air pressure moved the water too, so a thermoscope read the weather as well as the heat.

A real thermometer needed a sealed tube to keep the weather out, and two fixed points anyone could reproduce to hang a scale between.

Deciding what those fixed points would be came next.

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Caesar was a big deal. In 59 BC, he was consul, the Republic’s top job.

Lictors carrying bundles of rods walked ahead of him, and crowds parted as he strolled the Forum. He sat in an ivory-trimmed curule chair, his toga bordered in purple, and at dawn his hall filled with clients who all wanted favors.

Caesar wanted more, and it would take a war.

Debt was the first problem.

Plutarch says he owed 1,300 talents before he held a single office. Once, on his way to govern Spain, his creditors nearly blocked him from leaving Rome until Crassus bailed him out.

Now his enemies were lining up. Suetonius tells us two incoming praetors opened an inquiry into his consulship before he left Rome.

A governor with imperium, the legal power to command troops, couldn’t be tried while he held command.

Pompey had come home from conquering the East and celebrated a triumph that took two days to pass through Rome. A consul served one year, and Caesar’s remaining debts and his enemies would outlast his term.

He longed for a name to match Pompey’s.

A province would shield him from court, and the legions that came with it could win him glory and loot.

Caesar needed a war. Now.

In a place Suetonius says was “the most likely to enrich him and furnish suitable material for triumphs.”

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Gaul Was Caesar’s Option B

The Senate wanted to keep Caesar small. Suetonius says it assigned the incoming consuls a command over "woods and cattle tracks" in Italy. For an ambitious politician, about as attractive as a posting to Siberia in January.

His allies went around the Senate.

A tribune named Vatinius took a bill straight to the popular assembly, skipping the higher chamber. The lex Vatinia gave Caesar northern Italy and Illyricum, across the Adriatic, for five years.

One year was normal. Five years is a campaign. For five years, no court could touch Caesar.

Caesar's first war was probably meant for the Balkans, against the Dacian king Burebista. Three of his four legions sat near Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic, which points the same way.

Then Metellus Celer died. He governed Transalpine Gaul, the Roman province in southern France. The Senate handed it to Caesar too, partly because the assembly would have given it to him anyway.

He had legions and five years, and free, feisty Gaul sat next door.

The Allies Dial the Helpline

Two crises hit Caesar in 58 BC, back-to-back, and he used both.

The first was the Helvetii. They burned their own towns on the Swiss plateau and set out for the Atlantic coast, 368,000 people, according to census tablets Caesar says he found in their camp.

The direct route ran through the Roman province. They asked permission to cross.

Caesar stalled. While the Helvetii waited for his answer, his men built a wall along the Rhône, nineteen Roman miles long and sixteen feet high. Then he said no.

So they took the long way, through the land of the Aedui. The Aedui were Rome’s allies. They asked Caesar for help.

He marched out of his province and crushed the Helvetii.

He could have stopped there. Instead, he sent the survivors back to Switzerland. His stated reason was to keep Germans from settling the empty land.

The second crisis was Ariovistus.

A Suebian king, invited across the Rhine by the Sequani to fight their enemies. He stayed and took a third of their land.

Rome knew him. In 59 BC the Senate had named him a friend of the Roman people, with Caesar as consul.

Gallic chiefs asked Caesar to get rid of him. Caesar demanded he stop bringing Germans over the Rhine. Ariovistus refused. In Caesar’s telling, he ruled by right of conquest, same as Rome did.

Caesar attacked and drove him back across the Rhine.

Two wars in one summer, and Caesar wasn’t going home.

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Two gladiators closing the distance in a dusty arena. Shouts of thousands in the stands.

Slabs of muscle. Sweat cutting tracks through the dust on their arms. Fed on piles of red meat and eggs, built like two heavyweights about to go to war.

That’s the image from our films, video games, and a hundred years of marketing constructed on the word ‘gladiator’ itself.

Gladiator bone analysis shatters the myth.

In 2014, scientists tested gladiator bones pulled from a grave outside Ephesus. Gladiators weren’t eating like elite athletes. They ate like typical peasants.

But one number in their bones was even more surprising.

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How Researchers Knew Who Fought

Researchers ground bone samples from 53 skeletons into powder, then measured what was locked inside: carbon, nitrogen, sulfur.

Why measure them?

Carbon signatures show which crops fed a person; wheat and barley leave a different fingerprint than corn or millet. Nitrogen levels climb with meat and fall with legumes, so the number alone can separate a diet heavy in beans from one heavy in beef.

Sulfur points to protein source too, a second check against the nitrogen reading. Together, the three elements leave a permanent signature in bone, one that outlasts the person by decades.

The researchers relied on skull damage to pinpoint which skeletons were gladiators.

Eleven men had been hit hard enough to crack bone and lived: a sword edge, an axe, a mace, the kind of blow that should have ended a fight on the spot.

Sixteen wounds total, healed over, mended across months of more fighting after the first one didn’t kill them.

Three skulls told a more gruesome tale.

Holes punched clean through by a trident, a weapon only a gladiator would have faced. Most fighters wore helmets. Head wounds should have been rare. They weren’t.

The matchups were built to be unfair... a fast fighter with no head protection against a slow one wearing a helmet with eye slits too narrow to see much of anything coming.

Meals Fit For a Peasant Table

Once researchers knew who the gladiators were, they matched the results to civilians almost exactly.

Wheat. Barley. A trace of other plants. No special training table, and no extra meat.

Picture gladiators sitting down to meals.

Barley porridge cooked down for hours until it turned grey-brown and starchy, thick enough to stand a spoon in. Its smell filled a low stone room every morning before drills. Beans boiled soft alongside it, sometimes mashed into the same pot, onion and a splash of vinegar cutting the blandness.

No meat on the fire, no smoke off a spit. Grain and legumes, in the same room, every day.

Gladiators ate barracks meals, built to feed a lot of bodies for not much money.

A Ginormous Red Flag

The bone analysis revealed another shocker.

Gladiator bones carried noticeably more strontium relative to calcium than the civilians buried around them. That ratio matters because plants pull strontium from soil more readily than animals do.

Something was pushing extra strontium into these skeletons that was absent in ordinary Ephesians.

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I've been sending the Ancient Rome and Greece Battle Series posts to paying readers for about a month. I never put them on one shelf. That’s done tonight.

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• 26 Miles and Nobody Died

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Joseph Pickett

Past Passport.com.

I first met Julius Caesar in the fifth grade.

That’s when I learned, “Et tu, Brute?” and that he was stabbed to death on the Ides of March.

However.

What Mrs. Snook taught us in history class would earn a “Partly True” rating from Internet fact-checkers.

The stabbing happened. March 15th, 44 BC, at a meeting of the Senate. Fact Check: True.

Nicolaus of Damascus, writing within decades of the event, confirms it. So do Suetonius and Plutarch, roughly a century later.

Caesar's alleged last words, however, are Fact-Check: False.

No ancient source reports Caesar saying “Et tu, Brute?” Shakespeare made it up more than 1,600 years later, for his play Julius Caesar.

The dramatic line stuck so well that it became the entire Roman history lesson for generations of American fifth graders.

But the ‘Et tu, Brute?’ version also omits something important….that I didn’t learn until I picked up ancient Rome history books decades later.

There wasn’t just one Brutus among the killers. There were two.

And the famous one isn’t the one who broke Caesar’s heart.

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The Brutus We All Know

I learned about one Brutus in fifth grade. Marcus Junius Brutus, specifically.

He wasn’t some obscure politico who got lucky with a famous line. Marcus was a big-time political heavyweight in Rome. He’d reached praetor, one rung below consul, the second-highest office you could climb to in Roman politics.

Married to Porcia, daughter of Cato the Younger, one of the most rigid and respected defenders of the old Republic.

This Brutus believed in that Republic. Thought Rome shouldn’t answer to one man for life, no matter how brilliant that man was.

So when Marcus joined the conspiracy to murder Caesar, nobody was surprised. That’s why his name survived 2,000 years of history. Not because he struck the fatal blow, but because his motive fit the moment.

Shakespeare needed one name to carry the weight of betrayal. Marcus already had the reputation. The principled friend-turned-killer story is…Shakespearean…in its perfection.

One problem, though. Marcus betrayed Caesar for an idea: that killing him would save the Republic. The OTHER Brutus betrayed the man who trusted him.

The one Mrs. Snook didn’t tell us about in 1981.

Almost His Son

His name: Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus. Distant cousin of Caesar’s. And, by most accounts, one of Caesar’s most trusted friends.

His closeness to Caesar wasn’t in question. Cicero’s own letters to him read like correspondence between true friends, not just political allies. Nicolaus of Damascus, writing within decades of the assassination, describes Decimus as one of the men Caesar trusted most.

Years before the assassination, Caesar charged him with a fleet. Told him to deal with the Veneti, a Gallic tribe with ships too tall to board and too thick to ram.

Decimus won decisively anyway, not with brute force, but with an innovative idea. Long hooked poles that tore down the enemy’s sails instead of trying to sink their hulls.

Caesar’s undersized fleet shouldn’t have won that fight. Decimus is why it did.

You don’t hand off that level of responsibility to just anybody.

And the Veneti campaign wasn’t the only sign of their close friendship.

Decimus was included in Caesar’s will. He was named a secondary heir, next in line if Octavian, Caesar’s chosen heir, couldn’t inherit. Appian, writing generations later, thought it was close enough to an adoption.

This wasn’t a man on the outskirts of Caesar’s inner circle, waiting for a reason to turn on him. He was the ultimate insider.

Why Did Decimus Turn Traitor?

We don’t know for sure.

There’s an unflattering theory. Decimus’s surviving letters from late 45 BC show a change…something colder, more calculating. Historians studying them describe a man developing what one called “a nose for betrayal and a thirst for vengeance.”

Succession may have been on his mind. Watching Caesar increasingly build up his young grand-nephew Octavian as heir, Decimus may have seen his own future shrinking; secondary heir isn’t the same as heir.

A man that close to the top, watching the ladder pulling away from his grasp, had every reason to wonder: what happened to his own future if Caesar lived another twenty years and Octavian consolidated the throne first?

Caesar’s Last Morning

The night before his assassination, Caesar dined at the house of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, his second-in-command.

The talk turned to death and what the best kind looked like. Caesar, only half-listening, barely glanced up from his paperwork. “A sudden one,” he said.

That night, the doors and windows of his bedroom blew open. Caesar woke to find his wife, Calpurnia, groaning in her sleep. She dreamed their house had collapsed. That she was holding his murdered body in her arms.

By morning, Caesar had decided: he was staying home. The Senate would meet without him that day.

That’s when Decimus stepped in to influence matters.

Plutarch records him dismissing Calpurnia’s dream, telling Caesar it meant nothing. Then he took Caesar by the hand and led him out the door himself.

Caesar didn’t die because he ignored warnings. He died because the one person he trusted most walked him into the room where 60 scheming men waited with knives.

Et Tu, Brute?

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I ran the Mall 4-5 days a week when I worked in DC in the early 2000s.

Particularly on sunny, gorgeous days like Sept. 11, 2001.

It was an exciting, easy route to run. Flat, history everywhere. A great run most days. Even saw VP Cheney in his limo near the Washington Monument on Sept. 10.

Typical route: down K Street to Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill, past the Reflecting Pool, down the Mall to Lincoln, up the steps, then along the river past the D.C. War Memorial — a small domed monument for the 499 D.C. residents killed in World War I.

Down toward Jefferson, back up the hill toward the White House, and up to K Street again.

I’d always stop for a second to look at the DC WWI memorial, though. Back then it was buried in weeds and half-forgotten.

Forgotten history is interesting history.

It always struck me as strange and a little sad. World War I seemed like the forgotten stepbrother of World War II. But tens of millions of people died in that war — before military tactics had caught up to our ability to kill each other so efficiently.

Based on the photo I found below, it has been fixed up since.

That once-neglected memorial was a regular stop for me most mornings before I kept running down the Potomac. The only memorial on the National Mall dedicated specifically to DC residents.

Six, seven, eight miles most mornings.

Every time I bounded up the Lincoln steps, I’d pause at the top, hands on my hips, and look up at him. I always read the words carved above his head: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

Always liked those words, and I read them most mornings.

That day, I ran the same route. Up the Lincoln steps, then along the river towards Jefferson.

Maybe a minute or two before the explosion, I heard a plane low overhead.

Didn’t think anything of it. I’d heard that a hundred times before. Reagan National was a couple miles downriver.

A few minutes later, running straight ahead under a clear blue sky, after 9 am…

I saw the mushroom cloud rise over the trees. It seemed small. A second later…WHUMP.

I didn’t realize that I was looking at the Pentagon; the trees obscured the low building. Learned later I was probably three-quarters of a mile from the wall the American airliner hit, maybe closer to a full mile.

The fireball and smoke rising off it were probably 200 feet high or more, by other accounts from that morning. Seemed smaller a mile away.

I was dumbfounded for 10 seconds.

There’s some kind of scientific phenomenon, I think, when something is shocking enough, out of the normal enough, your brain just freezes. You see it, you hear it, but you can’t actually process it. A few seconds later, back to reality.

First coherent thought…

Gotta be a film shoot or TV show.

I’d been running that route for a couple of years. Seen them filming The West Wing behind the Capitol, and a movie or two along the Mall before. It didn’t seem impossible.

Then a woman about fifty feet away, another jogger, screamed. That’s what snapped me back. “What the fuck is happening?” I said. Or maybe I just said, “What the fuck.” Don’t remember.

Then the sirens started. One, distant. Then another. Then another. Then dozens. Hundreds?

Within a minute or two, the whole District was a wall of sirens. Never heard the like, before or since.

I kept running up the river and saw a uniform running and closing off the road over the bridge toward the Pentagon. He yelled at me, “NYC is being attacked too. Terrorism.”

I remembered seeing that small plane that had hit the WTC on TV when I left the building gym. My heart sank.

Smartphones were a decade away, so I knew nothing else.

Stood there, baffled.

What was I gonna do?

Ran back to my office on K Street, like any day.

Just another run as chaos erupted around me in DC. Ambulances and military vehicles racing. Sirens echoing. Every federal worker was already out on the street. Women crying, men cursing.

Surreal with me sweating in my running clothes, running by like another Tuesday as the city locked down around me.

My building was a ghost town on K Street. I think I was the only one in it — everyone else had been sent home. I knew the Metro would be chaos, so I stayed and read what I could online for a few hours.

I called my dad to let him know I was okay. He told me he’d seen the towers come down on TV. He was upset — not something I was used to seeing from him.

I went home late in the afternoon. National Guard troops were loitering everywhere, bristling with machine guns, military vehicles all over the city. Metro was dead silent.

The yellow line train ran straight past the Pentagon stop without stopping. I got home and watched the news.

A day not forgotten.

Twenty-five years later, I don’t think about it daily anymore. Just more around the anniversary.

Funny. My reaction depends on whether I’m thinking about it or speaking about it.

As I dictated this article’s first draft, my voice started to crack.

Like that beautiful, sad late summer day was yesterday.

If this resonated with you, I'd be glad to hear your own memory of that day, in the comments or on X@pastpassport.

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“Ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros.”

- Seneca, 64 A.D.

Fire tests gold. Adversity tests strong men.

Sixteen centuries later, London skipped the philosophy seminar and got the Great Fire.

September 1666.

Four days. Thirteen thousand houses incinerated. Eighty-seven churches. The Guildhall. Old St. Paul’s, reduced to a scorched, roofless shell.

Nearly the whole walled city turned to ash in ninety-six hours.

The official death count: six or eight people. Neil Hanson, a historian who’s studied the fire closely, thinks that’s wrong. The fire burned hot enough to cremate a body outright, and nobody was counting the poor.

Whatever the body count, most of the city’s housing and businesses were burned to the ground.

John Evelyn watched the disaster and wrote:

“The stones of Paules flew like granados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness.”

London needed to grieve, but first, it went hunting for vengeance.

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A Culprit London Could Hang

Everyone knew where the flames started.

A baker named Thomas Farriner. An oven on Pudding Lane, its embers not properly banked (raked over and covered to smolder low overnight) before he retired to bed.

Sparks from the embers caught kindling in a house built of timber. A hot, dry summer behind it. A hard east wind pushing it forward.

London was a firetrap waiting for a spark.

Nobody knew in the days after the fire, though.

Farriner swore he didn’t start it, and nobody could prove he lied. An accident nobody could pin on him wasn’t the story London demanded, anyway.

The year on the calendar:

1666.

Preachers didn’t need much convincing. Six-six-six, right there on the calendar. This was the end. An entire city incinerated doesn’t wait for an investigation. It wants a villain, and an accident won’t do.

London got its innocent man: Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker.

He confessed to what everyone already suspected: a plot, deliberate, foreign hands behind it. Even the judge didn’t believe a word. Hubert’s story kept changing, and something about him read as broken rather than guilty.

Irrelevant. A confession was a confession.

The mob walked him to Tyburn through streets still smelling of smoke, past a crowd big enough to fill the gallows field.

Hubert was hanged there. His body didn’t survive the walk to the surgeons afterward. The crowd tore it apart first.

He did nothing. And he died anyway.

Thomas Farriner walked away unscathed. He even signed the bill that hanged Hubert, then went right on baking navy bread from a shop a few hundred feet from where the body came apart.

What the Monument Doesn’t Say

Walk to the spot where it started in 2026, and you’ll find a column, not a plaque.

Wren built it between 1671 and 1677, a fluted Doric shaft topped with a gilded urn shaped like a flame. It stands 202 feet tall. That number isn’t decorative.

Lay the column on its side, pointed east, and it lands exactly on Pudding Lane, right where Farriner’s bakery stood. Wren measured the memorial to the fire itself, not to any person.

Three hundred and eleven steps take you to a viewing platform near the top, one of the most impressive views in the old City.

For decades after it went up, the inscription on its base blamed the fire on “the treachery and malice of the Popish faction,” official language, carved in stone, that stayed there until 1830, more than 150 years after everyone involved was dead.

Nowhere on that column is the hanged Robert Hubert’s name. Thomas Farriner’s isn’t there either.

The other signed the paper that hanged an innocent man, then went back to baking bread for the Royal Navy.

The Monument marks the fire’s location. It doesn’t mark who paid his life for it.

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Picture dozens of lasers streaking the dark nave of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, techno shaking the windows, twenty-year-olds dancing over the graves of Nelson and Wellington.

St Paul’s just signed a four-year deal with Fabric, London’s most famous nightclub. Exclusive rights to hold concerts inside the building through 2030. First show: October 29.

A church has stood on this site since 604 AD. The current building dates to 1710.

The public reaction: this is the end. Civilization is imploding.

Past Passport isn’t thrilled, either. But let’s slow down.

Seven hundred years ago, arrows flew in St. Paul’s. People shooting at birds nesting in the walls after the market in the aisle shut down for the day.

Ancient churches being reused is old news. Cathedrals have survived worse than a DJ set. Every time it happened, someone cried that the end was nigh.

St Paul’s got off easy, compared to other famous buildings.

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Nobody Shot 4K of the Chaos in 1400

No cameras existed then. No footage of every service, every fight, every deal cut in the pews. No footage means no mess, right?

Nah.

Rowdy is the word for it. The nave of St Paul’s had its own nickname: Paul’s Walk.

Flickering candles. People bartering, haggling, arguing, their voices bouncing off stone walls built to carry a choir, not a babbling crowd.

Footsteps echoed on the floor with every step. Hundreds of conversations blurred into one constant hum. One writer at the time called it Babel.

A bit of a hellhole, even in one of the most famous churches in the world.

Merchants met by name near a certain pillar. Lawyers took clients there for legal advice, mid-morning, mid-cathedral.

People nailed notices to the west door: jobs, lost property, meetings. They even had a name: siquisses, after the Latin opener, si quis — “if anyone.”

One regular described the routine: gentry and courtiers walked the middle aisle from eleven to noon, then three to six, some talking business, others trading news. The gossip was juicy enough that men close to the throne were leaking state secrets to complete strangers in the nave.

Someone was always smoking. Or selling something. Farmers drove wagons and livestock straight through the nave as a shortcut, until the queen banned it. Twice. A cathedral full of horse traffic wasn’t exactly neat as a pin, either.

A bishop in 1385 threatened excommunication over the St Paul’s chaos. People sold goods off tables like it was a market stall. Others played ball games in the nave, shattering the stained glass. Crossbows gouged holes in the parapets.

The excommunication threats fell on deaf ears.

Looking for peace and quiet in St. Paul’s in 1400? Wrong century.

Lasers and a DJ seem almost tame by comparison.

And St Paul’s isn’t even the nuttiest example of repurposing a sacred building.

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Caesar’s navy shouldn’t have had a chance in hell at the Battle of Morbihan in 56 BC.

The Veneti tribe of Brittany boasted a fearsome navy. It was bigger and tougher than anything Rome had built.

220 warships built for the open Atlantic against Rome’s 60 lighter galleys. The warships towered over the tiny Roman fleet.

By sunset, the Veneti’s leadership was dead. Their fleet was destroyed or captured, their people sold into slavery. Naval resistance in Gaul was over.

A year later, Caesar reused that same fleet to cross the Channel and invade Britain, a campaign no Roman had ever attempted before.

To understand how Rome pulled this off, imagine what Caesar was up against.

The Veneti had more ships, better built for the water they were fighting on, and generations of experience Rome’s navy lacked.

On paper, there was no way to win this.

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Oak, Iron, and Leather

The Veneti weren’t some podunk AA farm team Caesar was trifling with. The Veneti were bruisers.

Their territory sat on the coast of Gaul, in what’s now the Brittany peninsula of France.

Brittany, not Britainy, easy to mix up, but the Veneti were French, not British, though they traded heavily with the island across the water.

They owned the sea trade along that coast. Tin, metal, and shipments to Britain all ran through their harbors, and almost nowhere else’s.

Neighboring tribes ponied up cash to the Veneti just to move goods by water at all. The Veneti taxed the coastline the way a turnpike charges for using a freeway today.

If you wanted tin or metal moved here, you dealt with the Veneti on their terms, and they’d been building ships for exactly those conditions for generations.

The tribe’s reputation and influence were built into the ships themselves. They were the Rolls-Royces of the ancient Atlantic. Expensive, overbuilt, and unmistakable the moment they came into view.

You got out of the way or got killed.

Flat-bottomed hulls let them ride out the tides without running aground.

High prows and sterns were built to take the punishment of Atlantic storms the calmer Mediterranean never produced.

The hulls were tough oak, fastened with iron nails as thick as a man’s thumb, strong enough to shrug off a Roman ram without damage.

Even the sails were made of leather rather than flax canvas. Tougher, better suited to gale-force winds than anything cloth could hold.

Rome, to this point, was a land-fighting juggernaut. Its navy was another matter.

Every small galley in Caesar’s fleet had been built for the Mediterranean: calm water, predictable weather, hulls light enough to ram and board. None of that experience applied here.

On paper, this match should have been a blowout for the Veneti.

It didn’t turn out that way.

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