Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
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Miscellany
According to the twelfth-century-bc Judicial Papyrus of Turin, Pharaoh Ramses III was assassinated in a conspiracy led by one of his wives. The trial documents state that thirty-eight people were condemned to death for the killing. The pharaoh’s body was not believed to betray any signs of violence until 2012, when a team of researchers analyzing CT scans discovered that his throat had been slit—straight through to the vertebrae.
Is this dying? Is this all? Is this all that I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this! I can bear it!
—Cotton Mather, 1728Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
The World in Time
Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More