Tea at Trianon: Plato’s Grave

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, May 11, 2024

Plato’s Grave

From Smithsonian:

Thanks to an ancient text and specialized scanning technology, researchers say they have solved the mystery of Plato’s burial place: The Greek philosopher was interred in the garden of his Athens academy, where he once tutored a young Aristotle.

“We knew Plato was buried at the academy, which was very large,” says Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa who is leading the research, per the London Times’ Tom Kington. “But thanks to the scans, we now know he was buried in a garden in a private area, near the sacred shrine to the muses.” Some 2,000 years ago, the famous philosopher’s burial was recorded on a papyrus scroll housed in the Roman city of Herculaneum, according to a statement from Italy’s National Research Council. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., famously extinguishing the town of Pompeii to its southeast, it also destroyed Herculaneum, located at the volcano’s western base. A villa in the city—possibly belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—was full of scrolls, and while the volcano’s blast damaged and buried the papyri, it didn’t destroy them.

Researchers only discovered the trove of texts in the mid-18th century. Now known as the Herculaneum scrolls, they are “the only large-scale library from the classical world that has survived in its entirety,” as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) writes. (Read more.)