History: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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France kept the guillotine as its standard method of execution until the death penalty was abolished in 1981. The last person executed with it was Hamida Djandoubi, a convicted murderer, in Marseille on 10 September 1977.

The machine is named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a doctor who in 1789 asked the National Assembly for a single, quicker method of execution for everyone, whatever their rank. He did not invent it: the surgeon Antoine Louis and the engineer Tobias Schmidt built the first one, and it was first used in Paris in April 1792. During the Reign of Terror of 1793–94, about 17,000 people were guillotined. Executions stayed public until 1939, when the crowd's behaviour at one in Versailles led the government to move them inside prisons. The 1977 execution turned out to be France's last. In 1981 the justice minister Robert Badinter steered abolition through Parliament, and in 2007 a ban on the death penalty was written into the French constitution.

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The Library of Alexandria was founded in Egypt in the 3rd century BC by the Ptolemies, the Greek-speaking kings who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. It set out to gather the writings of the known world, held tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls and drew leading scholars.

The library was part of the Mouseion, an institute devoted to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts, which gave us the word ‘museum’. According to the physician Galen, books found on ships entering the harbour were taken and copied, and the owners were given the copies. Estimates of the collection range from 40,000 to 700,000 scrolls. Scholars who worked there included Eratosthenes, who calculated the Earth's circumference remarkably closely, and Callimachus, whose Pinakes is often called the first library catalogue. The library was not lost in one great fire. Its decline began when Ptolemy VIII drove scholars out of the city in 145 BC; a fire during Julius Caesar's war in 48 BC destroyed part of it; it dwindled under Roman rule, and fighting in the 270s AD probably destroyed what was left.

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The Berlin Wall opened on the night of 9 November 1989, after an East German official announcing new travel rules at a live press conference said they took effect ‘immediately’. Crowds rushed to the checkpoints, and that night the guards opened the gates.

The official was Günter Schabowski, spokesman for East Germany's ruling party. He had been handed a note about the rules shortly before the 6 pm press conference, without being told that they were meant to start the next day. His answer, ‘as far as I know, immediately, without delay’, went out live and was reported on West German television, which many East Germans watched. By late evening thousands had gathered at the Bornholmer Straße crossing. With no one higher up willing to take responsibility, its commander, Harald Jäger, let the crowd through. The wall had divided the city since 13 August 1961. Less than a year after it opened, on 3 October 1990, East and West Germany were reunified.

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Cleopatra VII, the last active ruler of ancient Egypt's Ptolemaic kingdom, came from a Greek-speaking royal family founded by Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's Macedonian generals. Her family had ruled Egypt for almost 300 years, yet she was the first of them known to learn Egyptian.

Cleopatra was born in Alexandria in 69 BC and became queen in 51 BC. Greek was her first language, and the ancient biographer Plutarch says she spoke many others. She won the support of Julius Caesar, with whom she had a son, and later allied herself with the Roman general Mark Antony. When Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Caesar's heir Octavian at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC, their cause collapsed. She died in August 30 BC, and Egypt became a province of Rome. Her father was Ptolemy XII, but her mother's identity is uncertain, so historians still debate her ancestry beyond the Greek-Macedonian line.

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On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, today's Istanbul, after a 53-day siege. Its fall ended the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which had outlived the western half by nearly a thousand years.

Mehmed was 21. His army far outnumbered the defenders, and his great cannons, cast by founders such as Saruca and the Hungarian Orban, battered the city's ancient land walls. When a chain across the Golden Horn kept his fleet out of the harbour, he had ships dragged on greased logs over the hill behind Galata and launched inside it on 22 April. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the final assault. Mehmed made the city his capital and took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of the Romans, because the Byzantines had always called themselves Romans; ‘Byzantine’ is a later label. Two smaller Byzantine states held out a little longer, the Morea until 1460 and Trebizond until 1461. Many historians treat 1453 as the end of the Middle Ages.

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The Code of Hammurabi, written for the king of Babylon around 1750 BC, is one of the oldest and best-preserved collections of laws. Its roughly 282 laws, carved on a 2.25-metre basalt stele (an inscribed stone slab), cover family, property, trade, wages and injury.

Hammurabi ruled Babylon, in today's Iraq, from about 1792 to 1750 BC. At the top of the stele he stands before Shamash, the sun god and god of justice; below, in Akkadian cuneiform, a prologue says the laws were meant to stop the strong from oppressing the weak. Each law takes the form ‘if someone does this, then this follows’. Penalties depended on rank: harming a noble was punished more heavily than harming a commoner or a slave, and some laws follow the ‘eye for an eye’ principle. About 600 years later a king of Elam, in south-western Iran, carried the stele off as plunder to Susa, where French archaeologists found it in 1901–02. It is now in the Louvre, and scholars still debate whether it was a law code in the modern sense or a showcase of model judgements.

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Shakespeare's plays are the earliest known written source for many English words and phrases, from “star-crossed” to “green-eyed monster”. But being first found in Shakespeare is not the same as being invented by him, and many such words turn out to have been used by others first.

The popular figure of about 1,700 words invented by Shakespeare rests largely on the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition cited him as the earliest user of many words. The scholar Jonathan Hope has pointed out why: the Victorian readers who collected quotations for the dictionary read Shakespeare more thoroughly than any other writer, so he often got the credit for words that can also be found in others. Later research, helped by searchable collections of early printed books, has found older examples of many of them. What remains is still remarkable. He turned nouns into verbs, added prefixes and suffixes freely and joined words in new ways, and dozens of his phrases, such as “salad days” and “sea change”, are still in everyday use more than four hundred years later.

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The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early 1000s by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, is often called the world's first novel. Its 54 chapters follow the life and loves of Genji, an emperor's son, and then the generation after him.

Murasaki Shikibu is not her real name, which is unknown. She served Empress Shōshi in Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, and wrote the tale between about 1000 and 1012, probably in instalments passed around among the women of the court. She wrote mostly in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, because Chinese, the language of government and prestige, was then considered men's business. Her own manuscript is lost; the tale survives in some 300 later copies that differ from one another, and the oldest illustrated scrolls date from the 12th century. Whether it is the “first” novel depends on the definition, since Greek and Roman prose stories are older, but its large cast, inner lives and characters who grow old give it much of what we expect of a novel. Arthur Waley's English translation of 1925 to 1933 made it famous in the West.

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Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was 18, after a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley by Lake Geneva. The novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.

That summer is remembered as the Year Without a Summer: the huge eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had cooled the world, and cold rain kept the friends indoors at the Villa Diodati, which Byron had rented. After an evening of reading German ghost stories, Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary struggled for days until the image of a scientist horrified by the creature he had brought to life came to her. Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre in the same contest. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first appeared in three volumes, just 500 copies, with a preface by Percy. Her name was first printed on it in a French translation of 1821 and, in Britain, in the second edition of 1823. It is often called one of the first science-fiction novels.

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George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, gave English terms still used for surveillance and propaganda: Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak and doublethink, the habit of believing two contradictory things at once. The adjective “Orwellian” came later.

Orwell wrote most of the novel on Jura, a remote Scottish island, while seriously ill with tuberculosis. It was published on 8 June 1949, and he died seven months later, aged 46. Its hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspapers so that the past always agrees with the Party. Newspeak is the Party's shrunken language, designed to make rebellious thoughts impossible to express, and Big Brother is the leader whose face watches from every poster. The earliest known use of “Orwellian” is by the American writer Mary McCarthy in 1950; the word now describes any system built on surveillance, propaganda and the denial of plain facts. Big Brother also gave its name to a reality television show, first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1999.

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Jane Austen's name never appeared on her novels while she was alive. Sense and Sensibility (1811) was credited only to “A Lady”, and her later novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, to “the Author of” her earlier books.

Austen published four novels in her lifetime, all without her name: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Anonymous novels were common at the time; Walter Scott published Waverley without his name in 1814. For a clergyman's daughter it was also a way to keep her privacy. The secret still spread: the Prince Regent admired her novels, kept a set in each of his residences, and Emma was dedicated to him. She earned £140 from Sense and Sensibility and sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice for £110. Austen died in July 1817, aged 41. Months later, her brother Henry wrote a biographical notice for the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which named her publicly as the author for the first time.

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The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, first published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, names most readers took to be men's. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey all appeared under these names in 1847, and few people knew who had written them.

The sisters grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors. They chose the pen names for their first book, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), keeping their own initials; it sold only two copies. In 1850 Charlotte explained that they had not wanted to take clearly male names, but did not want to be known as women either, because they sensed that critics judged women writers with prejudice. Guessing soon began, and some thought all the books were by one man. In July 1848 Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to show Charlotte's publisher, George Smith, that they were two different people; Emily refused to go. Within a year Emily and Anne had both died, and Charlotte later told their story under their real names.

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The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), is one of the oldest surviving works of literature; the first poems about its hero were written down about 4,000 years ago. It follows Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, whose grief at the death of his friend Enkidu sends him in search of eternal life.

The first Gilgamesh poems were written in Sumerian around 2100 BC, and by about 1800 BC they had been joined into one story in Akkadian, the language of Babylon. The best-known version fills twelve clay tablets in cuneiform, a script of wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay. In it, Gilgamesh finds Utnapishtim, the man who survived a great flood, and wins a plant that restores youth, but a snake steals it while he bathes. He goes home to Uruk and takes pride in its great walls, the work that will outlast him. The epic was forgotten once cuneiform fell out of use. Tablets turned up in 1853 in the ruins of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and in 1872 George Smith of the British Museum caused a sensation when he deciphered its flood story, so close to Noah's.

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Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in Spain in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is often called the first modern novel. Its hero, a country gentleman, reads so many tales of knights that he loses his wits and sets out to become one, with the farmer Sancho Panza as his squire.

Cervantes (1547–1616) had fought at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he lost the use of his left hand, and spent five years as a captive in Algiers before he wrote the book. He meant it as a parody of the chivalric romances, long tales of knights and giants that were bestsellers in Spain. What made it new was its interest in ordinary life and in how people see the world through what they read. In 1614 another writer, hiding behind the name Avellaneda, published a fake sequel. Cervantes answered in Part Two, where characters have read Part One and mock the impostor. The book is one of the most translated in the world, and a 2002 poll of writers from more than 50 countries, organised in Norway, named it the greatest work of fiction ever written.

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Most of Charles Dickens's novels first appeared in instalments, in cheap monthly parts or in weekly magazines, before they came out as books. He often ended a part at a moment of suspense, so readers would buy the next one.

Dickens's serial career began with The Pickwick Papers, sold in 19 illustrated monthly parts in 1836 and 1837. At a shilling a part, a novel became affordable to readers who could never pay for a whole book at once, and Pickwick made Dickens famous at 24. Later novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak House followed the same monthly pattern, while The Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times and Great Expectations ran weekly in magazines. Writing only a few parts ahead, Dickens could respond to readers' letters and to sales. The Old Curiosity Shop, whose young heroine Little Nell dies at the end, gripped readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The popular story of New Yorkers crowding the docks to ask arriving sailors whether Nell was dead is probably a legend.

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Shakespeare and Cervantes share a traditional death date, 23 April 1616, but they did not die on the same day. Spain had adopted the new Gregorian calendar while England still used the older Julian one, so Shakespeare in fact died 11 days after Cervantes.

Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 to correct the old Julian calendar, which had drifted ten days behind the seasons. Catholic Spain switched at once, but Protestant England kept the Julian calendar until 1752. Cervantes died in Madrid on 22 April 1616 and was buried the next day, and 23 April became his traditional date. Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April by the English calendar, which was 3 May by Spain's. The shared date still has a legacy: in 1995 UNESCO chose 23 April for World Book and Copyright Day, partly in memory of both writers and of the Peruvian author Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who is also recorded as dying on that date in 1616.

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Socrates, the Athenian philosopher who died in 399 BC, left no writings of his own. We know him mainly through his students Plato and Xenophon, and through a comedy that mocked him while he was still alive.

Socrates (about 470–399 BC) taught by asking questions in the streets and squares of Athens, and at about 70 he was tried for impiety and for corrupting the young, and sentenced to death. Plato, his most famous student, made him the main speaker in dozens of dialogues, and Xenophon wrote memoirs of him. The playwright Aristophanes had already mocked him in The Clouds (423 BC) as a crank who teaches young men clever tricks of argument. The three portraits often disagree, and scholars call the difficulty of recovering the real man the 'Socratic problem'. His silence on the page may have been a choice: in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing weakens memory and that a written text cannot answer back when it is questioned.

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In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners chained all their lives watch shadows on a wall and take them for the whole of reality. When one is freed and sees the sun, he realises the shadows were only copies, but on his return the others mock him.

The allegory opens Book VII of Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC, as a conversation between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. The prisoners face the back wall of a cave; behind them a fire burns, and people carry objects past it, so the prisoners see only moving shadows and hear echoes. The freed prisoner is at first dazzled and in pain, and only slowly learns to see real things and, at last, the sun. Plato uses the sun to stand for the Form of the Good, the highest truth in his theory that perfect, unchanging Forms lie behind the changing world we see. Back in the dark, the returning prisoner stumbles, and the others say the journey ruined his eyes; they would even kill anyone who tried to free them, a clear echo of Socrates' own execution.

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In 343 BC King Philip II of Macedon hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. For two or three years Aristotle taught him at Mieza, in what is now northern Greece.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) had close ties to the Macedonian court: his father, Nicomachus, had been physician to Philip's father, King Amyntas III. At Mieza he taught Alexander ethics, politics and literature, and young nobles such as Ptolemy, later king of Egypt, sometimes joined the lessons. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, Alexander kept a copy of Homer's Iliad annotated by Aristotle under his pillow on campaign, next to his dagger. The lessons ended when Alexander, at 16, was left to govern Macedon in his father's absence. He became king in 336 BC and in thirteen years built an empire stretching from Greece to India. Aristotle returned to Athens and in 335 BC founded his own school, the Lyceum. In later years the two men grew apart.

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When Alexander the Great met the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (today's Sinop in Turkey) in Corinth and asked what he could do for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Stand a little out of my sun.'

Diogenes (about 412–323 BC) left Sinope, a Greek city on the Black Sea coast, after a scandal over debased coins, and settled in Athens. He lived by begging, slept in a large storage jar and walked through the market in daylight with a lit lamp, saying he was looking for a human being. He was the best-known Cynic, from the Greek word for 'dog-like', a name that mocked his shameless way of life and that he wore with pride. The meeting with Alexander is told by Plutarch and by Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote about the lives of the philosophers, both centuries later, so its details may have been polished. Plutarch adds that Alexander said: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Sinop honours him with a statue, put up in 2006, showing him with his lamp and a dog.

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In The Second Sex (1949), the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that becoming a woman is shaped not only by biology but by upbringing, social roles and institutions.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher and novelist and a leading figure of existentialism, the philosophy that people are not born with a fixed nature but make themselves through their choices. She wrote The Second Sex in about 14 months and published it in two volumes in 1949. Its best-known line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, sums up her argument: society treats man as the norm and woman as the “Other”, defined only in relation to him, and education, myth, law and work then teach girls that role. The book sold some 22,000 copies in its first week, was placed on the Vatican's list of forbidden books and became a founding text of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil” after reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi organiser of the Holocaust. She was struck by how he described enormous crimes in stock bureaucratic phrases, as if they were routine office work.

Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-Jewish political thinker who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and reached the United States in 1941. Eichmann had managed the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and death camps; after the war he escaped to Argentina, where Israeli agents captured him in 1960. Arendt covered his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, and her reports became the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. By “banality” she did not mean the crimes were ordinary. She meant that Eichmann seemed neither a monster nor a fanatic, but a careerist who had stopped thinking about what his work meant. The book caused a storm, and later historians, using recordings Eichmann made in Argentina, showed he was a committed antisemite. He was executed in 1962.

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Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, filled private notebooks with Stoic reflections, written in Greek and never meant for publication. We know them today as the Meditations.

Stoicism was a Greek school of philosophy that taught people to focus on what is in their power, their own judgements and actions, and to accept calmly what is not. Marcus had studied it since his youth. He wrote much of the Meditations in the 170s, while leading campaigns against Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier; notes in the text place the first book in the land of the Quadi and the second at Carnuntum, a Roman fort in today's Austria. He gave the work no title. The Greek manuscripts call it Ta eis heauton, “To himself”. The notes survived in Byzantine copies and were first printed in Zurich in 1558 or 1559, and they have since become one of the most widely read books of philosophy.

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The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, the most powerful in recorded history, cooled the globe so much that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer”.

Tambora stands on the island of Sumbawa in today's Indonesia. It had rumbled since 1812, and on 10 April 1815 the eruption reached its climax; the explosions were heard more than 2,000 kilometres away and the mountain lost about a third of its height. At least 10,000 people died directly, and tens of thousands more on Sumbawa and nearby Lombok died of hunger and disease. The eruption sent millions of tonnes of sulphur gas into the stratosphere, the upper atmosphere, where it formed a veil that reflected sunlight, and summer temperatures in 1816 fell by about half a degree Celsius worldwide. Snow fell in the north-eastern United States in June, harvests failed across Europe and North America, and food riots followed. In Switzerland that wet summer kept Mary Shelley indoors, where she began Frankenstein.

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