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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Monday, May 01, 2023

What if Coriolanus hadn't decided to abandon his conquest of Rome?

Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus was, according to legend, a Roman General who was exiled from Rome following a position he took publicly against the Plebian Roman majority, and, to some extent against the Republic. Subsequently he joined with Rome's enemies, and took his armies to the walls of Rome itself, where he was met by his own mother, who persuaded him to abandon the siege. What if Coriolanus had simply brushed his mother aside, and conquered Rome? Would this have meant the end of the Roman Republic, and, if so, what would the consequences of this have been for the world as a whole? True, the Republic collapsed almost five centuries later anyway, when Rome became an Empire, but, what would the destruction of the Roman Republic at this early stage have meant for world history? A little more than a century later, the Gauls did indeed conquer and destroy Rome. However, the Gauls were an uncivilized tribe, and eventually were unable to survive in Rome, and simply withdrew, after the Romans paid them a ransom. So, Rome recovered, with the Republic intact. Coriolanus would likely have changed the structure of the Roman government, returning to a system of monarchy, and would have transplanted the Volscians, Rome's mortal enemies, into positions of power in Rome itself.

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