One thing I love about reading those “It happened today” lists from which these commentaries are derived is the breathless announcement of stuff you absolutely never heard of. Some of it is these weird no-hope ventures that litter the historical landscape and remind us how amazing it is that anything ever worked. Others are revealing in their obscurity.

For instance on March 8 “Ferdowsi completes his epic poem Shahnameh.” Does he now? Reading this sort of thing is like reading syllabus descriptions of advanced mathematical courses where even if you knew what they were saying you wouldn’t. For instance this selection from the current U of O offerings: “Manifolds, differentiable structures, tangent space, vector fields, differential forms, tensor fields, Riemannian metric.” A spare, elegant, concise exercise in utter incomprehensibility. But back to Ferdowsi.

Quick. Without Googling (if you already cheated and did, no raising your hand), in what century did he, she or it complete whatever that thing was? OK, in what half millennium?

Correct. The first half of the 2^nd millennium A.D. In 1010, to be precise. And many bonus points if you know, without being of Iranian extraction, that “Ferdowsi” is in fact Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi and Shahnameh is the world’s longest single-author epic poem and of great importance to this day to the people of “Greater Iran,” that is, Iran itself as well as regions influenced by Persian culture from Azerbaijan to Dagestan, and also to Zoroastrians who, I am amazed to report, still exist though in very small numbers, perhaps 200,000 worldwide (it is hard to be sure because many are in Iran which doesn’t count them properly).

I am not making fun of Ferdowsi, Shahnameh or Greater Iran here. Quite the reverse. I am pointing out that if you live in the West, and especially if you are of reasonably long-established Western stock, there is a great deal that you do not know about the world. For instance, what is the most commonly drunk alcoholic beverage globally?

No, not beer. Not wine. Not scotch. It’s baijiu, a fiery white liquor that is frequently rotgut although it is aiming to move upscale. Now admittedly it has a head start because it is popular in the world’s most populous nation where it originated. But the fact remains that a great many Chinese have heard of beer, wine and Scotch, as they have heard of John Wayne, Elvis Presley and Hercules. But you haven’t heard of any leading Chinese actors unless like Bruce Lee they went international, which is to say Western. As for Hercules (and don’t Google this or you’ll get the truly appalling martial arts movie Chinese Hercules, which I actually have seen but let’s not dwell on it), Mencius comments at one point that “whoever can lift the same weight as Wu Huo is himself a Wu Huo.” Which only makes sense if you know it’s a byword for a strong man. But you don’t.

OK, you might. In every class I have one smart aleck who has had baijiu without being of Chinese heritage. And maybe you’re that person. But by and large the West looms so large that everyone everywhere has heard even of our bad entertainment, while we know little even of their classics. For that matter, how many Chinese know the name of Barack Obama, versus the number of non-Chinese who can name their president? (It’s Xi Jinping, pronounced ɕǐ tɕînpʰǐŋ according to Wikipedia in case you suddenly have to say it right, and he’s also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and a thoroughly sinister character.)

I’m not apologizing. I’m proud of the West, and urge everyone to adopt its principles of liberty under law and individual rights. I’m just asking for a little sensitivity to those who think the Shahnameh should be up there with the Odyssey and get “Huh?” back, or “What’s that, a Riemannian metric?”

On this date, March 7, in 161 A.D. Antoninus Pius died. I always wondered if the title meant he was pious (his full name was Titus Fulvus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius but the last bits were added after he became emperor). It turns out no one’s quite sure. It may have been because he insisted the Senate deify his adopted father Hadrian which wasn’t exactly piety as we understand the word. But he was a good emperor.

What’s more, he was succeeded by a philosopher. There were a lot of issues with the Roman system of government including its tendency to succession by gladius in ventrem. But mysteriously, as that noted political commentator Louis Dearborn L’Amour once put it, in Education of a Wandering Man, “Even during the dark days of Nero and Caligula, the Roman Empire was governed well. The terrors they brought were largely spent on their associates at court; the administration in the provinces was only slightly affected, if at all.”

Incidentally it could be argued that if writers of pulp Westerns 50 years ago knew more about ancient history than most college professors today then progress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But I digress.

The point is, L’Amour was right. The Roman system signally failed to channel popular consent institutionally. And yet it generally furnished good government, more proof that political culture matters enormously given how in much of the world formal democratic institutions don’t improve governance much. And while it certainly put some truly awful people in the top office, and then removed them in several pieces, it also put some truly great ones in.

Including Marcus Aurelius, who initially shared the emperorship with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus, whose debauchery annoyed Aurelius without impairing his performance of his duties. After he died in 169 of the “Antonine plague” that may well have been smallpox or possibly measles, Aurelius ruled singlehanded as the last of what Machiavelli dubbed the “Five Good Emperors” and as a noted philosopher.

Now when someone says they are “being philosophical” about things it matters a great deal which philosophy. I don’t remember where I first encountered this insight, but I do recall Conrad Black telling a reporter he was feeling “philosophical” on his way into a Hollinger Inc. meeting and when asked which philosophy replied “Darwinian capitalism, as always.” But Marcus Aurelius was a distinguished exponent of the philosophy people typically have in mind when they use the phrase, of dignified stoicism that “can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same”.

I would be very surprised to see such a wise thinker and judicious leader elected at any point in the near future in any country on earth.

On the other hand, Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by the appalling Commodus, a cruel and capricious man who debauched the currency and also gladiatorial combat (a genuinely tremendous athlete and formidable archer, he personally killed crippled soldiers and citizens in the arena for laughs). Moreover, he was suspected of being the son not of Aurelius but of one of his somewhat shady wife Faustina the Younger’s gladiatorial lovers. And I am among those who suspect it.

Aurelius himself, regrettably, could not see that his son was a dangerous dud who would come to regard himself as the reincarnation of Hercules and was ultimately poisoned and when that didn’t work strangled in his bath, ushering in the “Year of Five Emperors” and much destructive turmoil.

So yes, Antoninus Pius showed that the Roman system could get the succession very right. But Marcus Aurelius showed that it could also get it very wrong, even in the hands of singularly enlightened rulers.

As I contemplate with horror a U.S. election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, after watching Justin Trudeau beat Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair, I find solace in the writings of Marcus Aurelius. But our system is still better.

So how about that pontiff Augustus? Or should I say Mr. Augustus?

I ask because I’m referring to the Emperor Augustus, who insisted that he wasn’t Emperor, just this plain ordinary First Citizen who also happened to be supreme military leader for life, tribune and censor. You know. Like anybody else.

Oh, and also pontifex maximus. Not Emperor, no really I’m not, from 27 B.C., he only added the title of Biggest Bridge-builder in 13 B.C. when his rival and previous title-holder Marcus Aemilius Lepidus died in exile.

Pontifex maximus was, generally speaking, a religious title in Rome, basically the chief priest of their blurry Olympian religion. Although as separation of church and state was as unknown to them as really clear and logical separation of powers within the state, the office carried important public and political power due to its authority over “religious” law which included the calendar that influenced public life (the pontifex could insert an extra month in a year if a political ally held office, for instance), burials, marriage, adoption and wills and also the regulation of public morals.

Plus custody of the state archives and keeping the official minutes of elected magistrates.

In short, a very major office with a potential importance out of keeping even with the official description, to the point that it was tussled over by politically prominent families at least in the late Republic when it was held among others by one Julius Caesar.

After the Emperors bagged it they kept it, rationally or not, until the 4^th century when Christianity came to dominate the empire and the title, though not its older functions, slid over to the bishop of Rome. Interestingly, it has never been officially added to the Pope’s titles, though.

Much as I admire Rome for its understanding of the rule of law, where they were well in advance of the Greeks, they never figured out how to tie down the state to popular will without veering into the demagogy that too often convulsed Greek politics. The fact that such an odd title of pontifex maximus could be added to that of Emperor by a guy who denied he was one, and then proceeded to govern so well that it seemed to legitimize the arrangement, underlines that there were critical elements missing from their system that would not appear until medieval England really did fuse rule of law with rule by the people where Athens and Jerusalem met in Rome then got into a Saxon longboat.

It was not until the Renaissance supplanted the Middle Ages that a king in that realm would claim also to be the chief priest, the egregious Henry VIII. And luckily, it was a claim that was almost never taken seriously by his successors.

I’m not sure it really was by Augustus either. But that’s because I don’t think the Romans took their own religion seriously by that point, plus the First Citizen was just sweeping up all the fragments of state power. Whereas in England it didn’t happen because they did take their religion seriously, and wouldn’t let anyone sweep up all the fragments of state power.

Number one with a bullet. That would be a fair description of Samuel Colt, who on March 5 of 1834 patented the revolver. He had a couple of misfires before sales really took off because the Texas Rangers ordered a Lone Star State quantity during the Mexican American war. And by the time Colt died in 1862, he was one of America’s richest men. That’s progress for you.

No, really. Whatever you think of firearms, Colt was a modern man who employed standard mechanical production of interchangeable parts to mass produce a product and slick advertising with celebrity endorsements to mass produce customers.

Colt wowed them at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, formally, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations and also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition, when he dumped a bag of parts on the table and assembled guns that worked without the necessity for hand-finishing by skilled craftsmen. It really was a revolutionary way of making things, all kinds of things, and it changed the world in ways from guns to automobiles to computers.

In a way it’s odd because one associates the six-gun with cowboys, those American equivalents of knights-errant, mounted on a horse, defending women’s honour, living by a code of honour and combating the dark knights who misused all these things.

OK, it’s a slightly romanticized vision. But there is a core of truth to it. And yet this essentially old-fashioned breed of men depended on this very modern technology. And there’s no halting progress.

As Lord Dunsany (who had the marvellously non-modern name Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18^th Baron Dunsany) put it in his novel Don Rodriguez, “Blame not the age, it is now too late to stop; it is in the grip of inventions now, and has to go on; we cannot stop content with mustard gas; it is the age of Progress, and our motto is Onwards.”

Certainly it was true at the Crystal Palace. And onwards we went indeed, from revolvers to machine guns and automatic weapons, followed by mustard gas that didn’t really work and nuclear weapons that did. In addition to guns, better metallurgy and efficient factory production created barbed wire that fenced in the wide open West, and railways that tamed it to the point that Kid Sheleen laments in Cat Ballou that the last time he was in Tombstone they’d turned the OK Corral in to a roller skating rink.

As far as I’ve been able to determine they never really did so, and in fact it seems there already was a skating rink in Tombstone in its heyday. But there really was a roller-skating Holliday Skate Palace in Valdosta, Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s because he once lived there (Valdosta, not the Skate Palace). Certainly Tombstone is now a tourist attraction rather than a real Western town, and you can buy Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp fridge magnets online.

The world is like that these days. And it’s not that way so much because of the six-gun as it is because of the very modern way it was made.

Samuel Colt. Number one with a bullet. And we never looked back.

The philosopher Heraclitus called war “the father of all” some 25 centuries ago. It is an unpleasant thought that armed conflict, widely regarded by humans as among humans’ most loathsome habits, could also be among our most important and, worse, effective. Over the long run ideas matter more, I am convinced. And yet it is not hard to point to specific battles and say if that had gone the other way, and it might have, the world would be dramatically different.

Take the 1238 Battle of the Sit River. Please. A showdown between the Mongol Hordes (a revealing agreed title for a socio-military enterprise) of Batu Khan and the Rus’ under Grand Prince Yuri II of Vladimir-Suzdal, it ended very badly for the latter. Trying to rally his men after the sack of his capital of Vladimir, Yuri was instead surrounded, beaten and of course killed by the Mongols.

This battle represented the end of organized resistance to the Mongols, who placed their disastrous political stamp on Russia over the next two centuries and turned it decisively away from the West with pernicious consequences we and they are still living with in the 21^st century. Prior to this rupture Kievan Rus’ and the various principalities were oriented toward the West.

Now perhaps Yuri and his culture were doomed anyway, and a victory at the Sit River would merely have delayed the catastrophe by a few months or years. But perhaps not. Perhaps if the timing had been a bit different, if the scouts had reported the position of the Mongols before it was “they’re all around us”, if some obscure and desperate struggle on some frozen hill had gone the other way, the Mongols might have been beaten off and Yuri might have become the nexus of a successful resistance celebrated to this day in story and song.

If so, it would have been one more example of how war is not merely decisive, but can be a decisive force for good in a turbulent and troubled world.

Alas, it was not to be. And this war was the father of an epic disaster still haunting us eight centuries later.

It is a paradox of history that Russia legally freed its most oppressed people before the United States did. And that it didn’t really work in either place.

Formally American slaves were freed on December 6, 1865, when the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by Georgia. But Russian serfs got their liberty, after a fashion, on March 3 1861 when Tsar Aleksandr II said let it be so. Except the serfs were owned by the government, who had to wait another five years just because.

In practice, of course, black Americans were denied full legal and social equality for a century afterward, especially in the South. And Russian serfs weren’t even as free as the rest of the populace that wasn’t free anyway.

You might be tempted to point to the Russian result as an argument in favour of autocracy or even tyranny. The tsar could do anything he wanted, and lawmaking was a bureaucratic rather than a democratic enterprise. So it didn’t matter a rouble what anyone else thought about emancipation. Once he decided on it, it happened.

In the U.S. you had to get things past “the people” even in the perverse situation where some of the people, which in some states was a minority, were preventing others from taking part in the discussion. White bigotry, in the north as well as the south, meant civil rights for blacks had to wait for a change of heart.

Not in Russia. Except not so fast.

For one thing, the tsar could say just about anything. But it wouldn’t necessarily happen. In a vast country with lousy communications, even if word arrived from Moscow or St. Petersburg it might be misunderstood or ignored. Or worse, it might be seen clearly to be flawed but there was nothing you could do.

Emancipation was like that. The “reform” was carried out in a way that left the peasants impoverished, helpless and resentful, and the nobility impoverished, helpless and resentful. In a speech to “the Marshalls of the Nobility” in March 1856, in reaction to the shock of defeat in the Crimean War, the tsar said “My intention is to abolish serfdom ... you can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below.” But these wise words were impossible to implement in a system that lacked popular input, let alone popular sovereignty, and Russia experienced virtually constant turmoil or fear of turmoil until 1917 when the Russian Revolution fastened a new and even more dreadful form of serfdom on everyone from the humblest muzhik to members of the Politburo.

There’s an important distinction between rule of law, that is, fair rules derived from the people and applicable to everyone, and rule by law, where everything is done by reasonably detailed and accurate bureaucratic methods including writing down the rules, but the rules can say just anything and change at any moment. (I do not know who first stated the issue in these terms; if anyone does please let me know because I think it’s a very important insight.) But Russia didn’t even get to the latter category.

Lawmaking wasn’t merely arbitrary, it was so haphazard that serfdom itself arose without discernible legal foundation. It was imposed by Boris Godunov in the very late 16^th century, to the extent that it did not merely put the official seal on existing oppression. But it wasn’t put into the law code until Tsar Alexis more than half a century later, in 1649. And in assembling that law code the tsar actually had to get bureaucrats to scour the country and correspond with various local notables to try to discover what edicts tsars had actually flung in various directions, many lapsed, ignored or contradictory.

The result of the American process is impossible to love either in this case. Even sound institutions are no match for hatred in the human heart at least in the short run. But by channeling discussion into mostly lawful channels, exposing institutions to free inquiry and demanding justifications, emphasizing the dignity of the individual and creating space for civil society, they lay the foundation for a gradual softening of ancient hatreds.

Thus it is that the United States has a black president, and Russia is ruled by a tyrannical, weird autocrat whose whim is highly ineffective law in a highly dysfunctional government, economy and society. Even though formal liberation for the most oppressed came sooner there.

On March 2, 1877, the Republicans stole the election of 1876. Sort of. It’s not the only stolen election in US history, I’m sorry to say. But it was the most brazen and, awkwardly, sort of justified.

It happened like this. Much of the South was still occupied by federal troops in the aftermath of the Civil War. Southern white voters were overwhelmingly Democrats because of that same war. And they weren’t willing to let blacks vote.

The occupying federal forces often did allow blacks to vote, regrettably as much to annoy white “rebels” as out of genuine sympathy with blacks. It was the right thing done the wrong way in many cases, and sowed even more bitterness where an abundant crop was already growing.

In the 1876 election, among many other shenanigans, Democrats in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina used fraud and intimidation to keep Republicans from voting or to deceive them into casting ballots the wrong way (for instance printing pictures of Lincoln on Democratic ballots).

Ultimately the matter brought tempers to such a boil that armed insurrection was a genuine possibility. And it was further complicated because the Constitution says that “the President of the Senate shall, in presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the [Electoral College] certificates, and the votes shall then be counted.” But it doesn’t say by whom.

As Congress was then divided between a Republican Senate and a Democratic House, it’s not hard to guess that Republicans said the president of the Senate should do the counting while Democrats said both Houses had to concur.

Finally Congress created an Electoral Commission consisting of five senators, five Congressmen and five Supreme Court justices. The senators were divided by party 3-2, the Congressmen 2-3 and two justices were chosen from each party and asked to select a fifth. They chose an independent and the thing just hung there in midair with inauguration day fast approaching (it was in March not January until the 1930s).

Finally a deal was made whereby the Republicans would get the White House and Reconstruction would end. That made Rutherford B. Hayes president for one term, just two days before Inauguration Day, and earned him the nickname “Rutherfraud” Hayes. And plunged the South back into white supremacy, segregation and injustice for almost another century.

So here’s the thing. Absent federal troops, those states would have voted Democrat and made Samuel J. Tilden president. (By the way, Tilden himself reflected after the outcome “I can retire to public life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”) But only because they would have excluded blacks who were a large portion of the inhabitants.

In fact Mississippi, die-hard white supremacist state of all die-hard white supremacist states, actually had a black majority and would have voted Republican in genuinely fair elections.

So the long and short of it is that in 1876 the Republicans stole the election back from the Democrats who were busy stealing it by cheating blacks of the franchise. And the price the GOP paid for that single term by an undistinguished president was to let white southerners keep stealing their states, if not entire elections, from their black fellows.

I don’t know what else they could have done, by the way. It wasn’t possible to occupy the South indefinitely, and it wasn’t possible to protect black voting rights by any other means. So it’s an unpleasant and disquieting reflection on the depths to which bigotry can drive us that the Republicans were quite justified in what was, on the surface, electoral fraud, but it wasn’t enough to fix an underlying problem that festered for another century.

The other stolen election, by the way, was 1960, and that one was almost as brazen and utterly unjustified even if it was stolen from Richard Nixon. But that’s a story for another day.

On this day in history, March 1, Romulus did not celebrate the first Roman triumph back in 753 B.C. Or if he did, no one took photographs or any of that stuff so we just don’t know.

Nonetheless, the Romans believed he did, following his victory over Caenina, Antemnae and Crustumerium, three Latin towns that resisted Roman rule and it didn’t work out very well. Although according to legend the deal was that the Romans had just carried off their daughters, along with those of the Sabines, which doesn’t sound to me like that valid a reason for conquering them when they tried to get them back.

Nor does it sound that great to celebrate a guy conceived by Mars with a vestal virgin who killed his own brother in a spat over where the city should be, became autocratic and vanished mysteriously, perhaps ascending to heaven to become Quirinius, “the divine personification of the Roman people.” Or so says Wikipedia and if it’s on the Internet it must be true, right?

Same as if it’s in your foundation myth, along with Romulus being descended from Trojans and raised by a wolf.

The thing is, it sure makes you sound fierce. But at some point it also makes you sound gullible. And I wonder just how early Romans started scoffing into the sleeves of their togas even while pretending on formal occasions to take it all very seriously.

Indeed, in reading Roman mythology, on which I was quite keen as a teen, I’ve often been struck by the way in which, except in their most unattractive moments, the Romans were far better men and women than their philosophy would justify. Their gods were cruel, capricious, short-sighted and often remarkably dim as well as lustful and dishonest. On what grounds would the Olympians inspire you to be selfless, honest, dutiful and of all things pious?

Over in Greece this realization dawned at least on some people early on. Euripedes ripped the gods to bits to cheering theatre audiences, while Pindar and Aeschylus had tried in vain to clean up the myths.

And before they even got to the topic, Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived in the 6^th century BC, protested indignantly that “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men: theft, adultery, and deceit.” But perhaps the Greeks were more given to abstract thought than the Romans.

Still, Juvenal around 100 AD certainly ridiculed the traditional religion, saying “Today not even children – except those small enough To get a free public bath – believe all that stuff about ghosts, Or underground kingdoms and rivers, or black frogs croaking In the waters of Styx, or thousands of dead men ferried Across by one small skiff.” And there’s no question that the ancient world was ripe for conversion by Christianity because its people were too cosmopolitan for all this rubbish.

Still, I puzzle over how they could for centuries have gone around half-believing in a religion whose gods were lewd resentful bums and whose afterlife you wouldn’t wish on your enemy’s goat.

I know, it’s easy to laugh at past ages. It’s a habit I discourage. They were people like ourselves. And it’s disturbing to reflect that we presumably therefore believe stuff as offensively ludicrous as the Olympian religion. For instance the horoscopes in the newspapers. And much else besides in politics as well as in religion.

As for Rome, I do think the lar had a cool name. But the rest was rubbish. Even Romulus.