One of the most influential works in Chinese history, the Analects of Confucius were written over a period of several decades durring the Warring States period.
Ever since copies of the Analects first begin to be distributed, over 2000 years ago, it has shaped Chinese society, teaching the Confucian virtues to generation after generation. Its influence has also been felt in other parts of Asia, as it slowly diffused into other nations and cultures.
Even today, the Analects remains one of the canonical texts that any serious Chinese scholar (or scholar of China) must read and understand in order to be considered properly educated.
It’s an iconic image, symbolising madness, decadence and a corrupt lust for power. But did it actually happen?
In all probability, it didn’t. For a start, the fiddle would not be invented for another thousand years – Nero played the lyre. And according to Tacitus, Nero not only wasn’t in Rome when the fire occurred, but raced back to organise the relief efforts and funded a large portion of the reconstruction of the city from his own purse. Hardly a picture of a depraved monster, is it?
The fire is believed to have started near the Circus Maximus. It burned for seven days and five nights – on the fifth day, it was nearly quelled before flaring up with renewed strength. Of the city’s 14 districts, seven were damaged and three destroyed outright.
One of the most well-known Middle Eastern poets in the West, largely due to an apparently neverending series of translations of his Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyám was also a mathematician, an astronomer, and as his poetry tends to indicate, a philosopher. He’s one of the few people in history that could have dealt with Leonardo da Vinci as an equal, a true polymath whose work remains influential even today. Notably, he was one of the reformers who modified the Persian Calendar in 1079 – the new calendar, known as the Jalali calendar, is still in use (with some minor corrections) in Iran and Afghanistan.
Of course, he was also damned cool – legend has it that he was a boyhood friend of Hassan i Sabbah (and if you don’t know who he was, you’re in for a surprise), while modern historical research has uncovered evidence suggesting that he devised a heliocentric model of our Solar System centuries before Copernicus. Frankly, he’s a candidate for interesting historical fictions just waiting to happen.
Referenced in: Asia – Awake Bing Crosby – The Road to Morocco Van Morrison – Rave On, John Donne Edgar Broughton Band – Roccococooler
Hegel was one of the most influential philosophers of his time. He built upon the work of Kant, Descartes, Hume and others – his work assumes a familiarity with the writings of many of his predecessors – and Hegel himself was an influence on any number of the philosophers who followed him, notably Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno.
Hegel lived to be 61 years old, and spent most of his adult life studying and writing in a total of eight different German universities. He wrote four books: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807); Science of Logic (published in three volumes: 1811, 1812 & 1816); Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816) and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1822).
Franz Josef Haydn is known as both the “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet” because of his important contributions to these genres. However, despite his many contributions to the sonata form, he is not the “Father of the Sonata.”
He was a prolific composer with few illusions regarding the magnitude of his talents or the importance of his contributions to the development of music. He died at age 77, shortly after an attack on Vienna by Napoleon’s force. Among his last words was a characteristically humble attempt to calm and reassure his servants when cannon shot fell in the neighborhood: “My children, have no fear, for where Haydn is, no harm can fall.”
Carl Maria von Weber was one of the earliest significant composers of what is now called the Romantic movement. His best known works include his operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon, and the Konzertstück (Concert Piece) in F minor (a work for piano).
In addition to his composing, von Weber was also a noted for his orchestration, a music journalist, and an engraver. The last of these he actually taught himself – he wanted to be able to engrave his own compositions.
He was 39 years old when he died of tuberculosis while visiting London. Although his remains were buried there, they were later exhumed and reburied in Dresden at the instigation of Richard Wagner. Von Weber had been director of the Opera since 1817.
His first recorded appearance was on this day in 1828, on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany. He would barely talk; when a cobbler named Weickmann took the boy to the house of Captain von Wessenig, to whom a letter carried by Hauser was addressed, his only utterances were “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was,” and “Horse! Horse!” Further attempts to get him to communicate brought forth only crying, or the obstinate proclamation of “Don’t know” from Hauser.
The only identification he carried was the letter to von Wessenig, the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment. It was dated “From the Bavarian border / The place is not named / 1828″. The anonymous author said that the boy was given into his custody, as an infant, on the 7th October 1812, and that he had instructed him in reading, writing, and the Christian religion but had never let him “take a single step out of my house”. The letter stated that the boy would now like to be a cavalryman; and that therefore, the captain should take him in or hang him. There was another short letter enclosed, purporting to be from his mother to his prior caretaker, but later discovered to have been written by the same hand as the other one. It stated that he was born on April 30, 1812, and that his father, a cavalryman of the 6th regiment, was dead.
Hauser later became more communicative, but the puzzle of his origin was never solved, and his death, in 1833, was scarcely less mysterious.
One of those cases where I have categorised the event as Culture, despite its ill-fit there, primarily due to the fact that it seems to fit any other category even less.
Of all the great philosophers, none is quite so famous for being, well, a raving loon, as Friedrich Nietzsche.
Born in Rocken, near Leipzig, on October 15, he would become the most famous German philosopher of the 19th century. His best known works include the posthumous “Will To Power”, “Ecce Homo”, “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Spake Zarathustra”.
Nietzsche was widely seen, in Germany and elsewhere, as a supporter of German militarism – and his work was influential to Hitler and other Nazis (although they were selective in their use and interpretation of him). Later, he was seen as a forerunner of the Existentialists. However, his most lasting contribution to Western culture may be the concept of the Übermensch, or Superman.
The very archetype of the tortured artist, Edgar Allan Poe was a writer of phantasmagorical fictions, often featuring delirium, madness and grief as major ingredients. As such, he is basically the forefather of the entire gothic movement, especially that portion of it that drinks absinthe.
Aside from his work in horror – which is the majority of his work – he also wrote several early science fiction stories, and is generally credited with the invention of the modern detective story. His detective, C. Auguste Dupin, not only predates Sherlock Holmes, but rates an occasional mention by the Great Detective even in the original Doyle stories.
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore by one Joseph W. Walker. Upon discovering that Poe was in some form of delirium, Walker took him to a hospital. Poe died there four days later at 5 in the morning. The cause of his death, or even of the delirium that preceded it, is unknown. Poe never became coherent after Walker found him, and thus, it has never been determined how he came to be in that state. Moreover, all the hospital records pertaining to his death have been lost.
Alice was written in 1865, three years after the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson first devised the story to entertain the real Alice and her sisters. He had originally told the tale to Alice and her sisters while he and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat up the River Thames with three little girls: Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell.
The girls loved it, and Alice asked Dodgson to write it down for her. After a lengthy delay — over two years — he eventually did so and on 26 November 1864 gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, with illustrations by Dodgson himself.
But before Alice received her copy, Dodgson was already preparing it for publication and expanding the 18,000-word original to 35,000 words, most notably adding the episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party. In 1865, Dodgson’s tale was published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by “Lewis Carroll” with illustrations by John Tenniel.
Referenced in:
Alice – Stevie Nicks
Alice in Wonderland – Lisa Mitchell
