Though described by Suetonius as having a “fat neck” and “potbelly,” Nero competed at the Olympics in 67, in the chariot race. He fell out of his vehicle and failed to finish but paid hefty bribes to the judges and secured first place.
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During a battle with Scythians in Macedonia on April 29, 1091, Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus noted the midday sun “shedding its rays,” reported his daughter Anna Comnena in the Alexiad. He dispatched local peasants to bring water in skins or jars to his troops, who “sipped a drop of water, then returned to the fray.” The newly hydrated Byzantines wiped out their enemies, and a chant began: “All because of one day the Scythians never saw May.”
“When the maids are beautiful and the concubines charming, this is not a blessing,” warns Confucian master Zhu Bolu in a seventeenth-century work of household advice. “For servants,” his next maxim advises, “don’t employ handsome boys.”
According to a 2021 study published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “noninstructional spending” at universities is growing faster than “instructional spending”; between 2012 and 2018, “colleges and universities prioritized hiring less expensive and often less credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.”
President Abraham Lincoln on November 21, 1864, sent a letter to Mrs. Bixby, who, the War Department informed him, had lost five sons fighting for the Union. “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” In fact, two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons were killed in action, a third either deserted or died while a prisoner of war, a fourth was honorably discharged, and the fifth deserted.
Charles Lindbergh bought five sandwiches for his flight across the Atlantic in 1927, saying, “If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more either.” It took him thirty-three and a half hours. Amelia Earhart in 1932 flew across the Atlantic in fourteen hours and fifty-six minutes, during which she drank chicken soup from a thermos, and a can of tomato juice—opened with an ice pick.
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.
The Athenian orator Lysias, a generation younger than Antiphon—who pioneered the business of writing defense speeches—once upset a litigant, according to Plutarch, for whom he had prepared a defense, because the first time the man read the speech it “seemed to him wonderfully good, but on taking it up a second and third time it appeared completely dull and ineffectual.” After hearing the man out, Lysias replied, “Well, isn’t it only once that you are going to speak it before the jurors?”
A 2018 study run at Buttercups Sanctuary in Kent, England, found that goats are sensitive to human emotions and strongly prefer to sniff smiling, happy faces rather than frowning ones.
Beware a comet “if it resembles a flute,” Pliny the Elder warned; “it portends something unfavorable related to music.” The Roman author did not offer further particulars.
During his first trip to New York City in 1964, Samuel Beckett went to a doubleheader at Shea Stadium with his friend Dick Seaver, who explained the game of baseball to the Irish writer. Halfway through the second game, Seaver asked, “Would you like to go now?” To which Beckett replied, “Is the game over, then?” “Not yet,” said Seaver. Beckett concluded, “We don’t want to go then before it’s finished.” The Mets won both games, unlike their double loss two months earlier in what had been the longest doubleheader in Major League history, clocking in at nine hours and fifty-two minutes.
As a member of a Cherokee delegation to Washington, DC, Sam Houston wore traditional loincloth and blanket to an 1818 meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who was offended and chastised Houston for his dress. Twenty-two years later, between terms as president of the Republic of Texas, Houston wore such a blanket to meet Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, comte de Saligny, in Austin.
While minister to France in 1778, Benjamin Franklin met Voltaire at the Academy of the Sciences. On hand was John Adams, who wrote that “neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected” of them by the crowd. Eventually, the two embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, an act that Nicolas de Condorcet said provoked such enthusiastic approval that “it was said to be Solon who embraced Sophocles.”
Roman gladiators’ vegetarian diet was so full of beans and barley they were called hordearii, “barley men.” While serving as a gladiator-school physician, Galen criticized the diet; it built up bodies “not with dense and compressed flesh,” he wrote, “but instead rather more spongy.”
“He whose meat in this world do I eat,” reads the Hindu Laws of Manu, “will in the other world me eat.” Another verse simply warns not to “behave like the flesh-eating ghouls.”