Month: May 2025

“If there was one institution that left an indelible mark on the Late Roman and Byzantine way of life, that was surely taxation. The imposition of regular and extraordinary levies—in kind upon the farmer and in money upon the merchant and artisan—was meant to be equitable; in fact, it hit the agricultural population harder than the urban, the poor much more than the rich.” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

“If the slave was generally absent from the rural landscape, the tenant farmer (colonus) was an important feature of it. A man of degraded and anomalous status, the colonus was theoretically free, but in practice tied to his plot. He was, as a law of [AD] 393 puts it, ‘a slave of the land’. His condition was hereditary, his freedom to marry restricted, and he could not even join the army. The master of his land collected his taxes and was empowered to put him in chains if he tried to run away. It was openly admitted by the government that there was little difference between the status of a slave and that of a colonus. The authorities, of course, were not animated by pure sadism in curbing the liberties of the tenant farmer; their primary concern was the collection of tax.” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

“The archaeological exploration of the Limestone Massif in northern Syria, a region that attained great prosperity thanks to the cultivation of the olive tree, has shown not only the co-existence of large and small holdings, but also a general trend, in the period extending from the fourth to the sixth century [AD], towards the break-up of the bigger estates and the growth of villages composed of relatively well-to-do, independent farmers. While the conditions in the Limestone Massif were probably untypical of the rest of Syria, not to speak of other parts of the Empire, they serve to emphasize the danger of drawing general conclusions from literary and legislative texts.” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

“I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.” – Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy

“For a time I was the managing editor of a literary website. At a conference, someone asked me which writers inspire me and I immediately thought of everyone in the slush pile. For writers and editors alike, the slush pile is often confounding and frustrating, but I see it as a cache of humanity, a pile of hope. Our slush pile is overflowing with people telling their stories despite overwhelming odds.” – Lyz Lenz, “Do our stories matter?”, Men Yell at Me, November 27, 2024

“The beauty of memory rests in its talent for rendering detail, for paying homage to the senses, its capacity to love the particles of life, the richness and idiosyncrasy of our existence. The function of memory, while experienced as intensely personal, is surprisingly political.” – Patricia Hampl, “Memory and Imagination”

“In this swamp of fear, all we have are our words.” – Lyz Lenz, “Do our stories matter?”, Men Yell at Me, November 27, 2024

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (quoted by Lyz Lenz in “Do our stories matter?”, Men Yell at Me, November 27, 2024)

“We have from the sixth century [AD] a much more elaborate classification of the civilian part of [Byzantine] society into ten groups, namely: 1. The clergy; 2. The judiciary; 3. Counsellors (senators?); 4. Those concerned with finance; 5. Professional and technical; 6. Commercial; 7. Those concerned with the provision of raw materials; 8. Subordinates and servants; 9. The useless (in other words, the old, the infirm and the insane); 10. Entertainers (charioteers, musicians, actors).” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

“The records of the central government (and it should be remembered that the Byzantine Empire was a bureaucratic state par excellence), of the provincial administration, of the Church, of secular landlords, tenants, merchants and shopkeepers have all disappeared. As a result, we have no reliable population figures, no registers of births, marriages and deaths, no trade figures, no taxation figures—practically nothing, in short, that can be counted and used for statistical purposes.” – Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome

“It is not enough to speak, but to speak true.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

“Never can anything be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact: one sees more devils than vast hell can hold; that is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, that, if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy; or in the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush supposed a bear?” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1

“Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days: the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1

“The heresies that men do leave are hated most of those they did deceive.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.3

“Things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste; wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: and therefore is love said to be a child, because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in games themselves forswear, so the boy Love is perjur’d everywhere.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1

“Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, Behold! the jaws of darkness devour it up: o quick bright things come to confusion.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1

“The course of true love never did run smooth.” – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1

“In a world full of wonders man invented boredom.” – Wendy Northcutt, The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution

“How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! which their keepers call a lightning before death.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 5.3

“Mischief, thou art swift to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 5.1

“She’s not well married that lives married long; but she’s best married that dies married young.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.5

“’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.2

“Venus smiles not in a house of tears.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.1