By Leah Mordehai – “A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.” Frederick the Great Why was Frederick II of Prussia an enlightened ruler? One of the most enlightened rulers of all time, Frederick […]
Quadrilingual Funerary Inscription – Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Arabic – in Palazzo Normanni, Palermo, 12th c. (photo P. Hunt). By Anthony Klein – The island of Sicily in the 12th century has long been portrayed as a golden age of multi-cultural amity resulting in spectacular wealth and a flowering of syncretic art […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – Hair color should never be considered responsible by itself for determining character and destiny, nor have more redheads per capita likely been any more statistically dynamic than brown-, black-, blonde-haired folk. But the number of redheads who have been unstoppable in history may come as […]
By Timothy J. Demy – The legacies of the classical world and late antiquity are many. In the second century CE the early Christian philosopher from Carthage, Tertullian (ca. 160 – ca. 220), asked an oft-repeated (and misunderstood) question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”De praescritione haereticorum 7). Two disparate cities,”one, a center of […]