In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
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In her account of tenth-century Kyoto court life, The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon was fond of making lists. “Things later regretted: an adopted child who turns out to have an ugly face”; “Things it’s frustrating and embarrassing to witness: someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says”; “Moving things: a child dressed in mourning for a parent.”
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west,” said the Apache leader Cochise, “and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it.”
A copy of crew rules kept by eighteenth-century pirate captain Bartholomew Roberts was found after his death in 1722. These granted each man equal title to “strong liquors at any time seized,” threatened with death anyone found seducing a woman “and carrying her to sea in disguise,” and prohibited discussion of “breaking up their way of living” until each pirate had earned £1,000.
After Helen Gahagan Douglas was elected as a Democratic representative in 1944, news outlets spread rumors of a vicious rivalry between her and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce; one headline read helen vs. clare: torch vs. icicle. “For reporters short of real news,” Douglas complained, “it was a simple day’s work to speculate that we would claw at one another.” The women resolved to avoid giving fodder to such baseless stories by never discussing the same subject on the same day.
Asked whether it was night or day that first emerged when the universe came into existence, sixth-century-bc Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
Gone to Greece to fight for the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Lord Byron, who financed a fighting force, noted in his journal on September 28, 1823, that he “did not come to join a faction but a nation—and to deal with honest men” and was dismayed to find that “they are such d——d liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.” Nevertheless, he died there on April 19, 1824, after contracting a fever.
Primary school students in eastern Nigeria are encouraged to focus on their education with a song whose lyrics translate as “Education is sweet but hard to learn, but with patience, you can succeed if your parents have the white man’s money.”
Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, received the prize for tragedy at the dramatic festival the year that Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex. None of his one hundred or so plays is extant.
Lamoignon de Malesherbes chose to defend Louis XVI during his trial of 1792 and 1793; years earlier, as secretary of state, Malesherbes had reported on the corruption in the king’s administration and condemned the imprisonment of French citizens without trial. Both the king and the lawyer were eventually guillotined. “No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M, after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, who was Malesherbes’ great-grandson.
Born on Lesbos around 700 BC, Terpander, a master of the kithara, was summoned to Sparta during a period of civil strife—an oracle had suggested bringing the “Lesbian singer” to help—and organized the city-state’s earliest civic music culture. Immensely popular there, he later returned for what was to be his last performance. While he was playing, a fig thrown by an adoring fan went directly into his mouth. Terpander choked on the fruit and died.
In August 1945 pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper was working at Harvard University on the experimental Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical protocomputer being used in the war effort. After a circuit malfunctioned, one of her colleagues removed a two-inch-long moth using tweezers. Hopper taped the moth into her logbook and later recalled the first use of a now ubiquitous term: “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
The eponymous temptress of Dolly Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene” was based, according to the country singer, on a bank teller who flirted with her husband, Carl Dean. “Every time I look at him sleeping over there in his La-Z-Boy, snoring, that hair turning gray at the temples,” Parton said in a 2014 interview, “I wonder if Jolene is still around. I’ll call her up and say, ‘You come and get him now!’ ”
“The ancient Roman class struggle was only fought out within a privileged minority,” wrote Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed a purely passive pedestal for the combatants. People forget J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s significant expression: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”