A recent study has revealed that there has been recurrent mating between dogs and wolves throughout Eurasia: The international study showed that around 60 per cent of Eurasian grey wolf genomes carried small blocks of the DNA of domestic dogs, suggesting that wolves cross-bred with dogs in past generations. The results suggest that wolf-dog hybridisation […]
Mika Ojakangas, On the Origins of Greek Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower London and New York: Routledge, 2016 Mika Ojakangas is a professor of political theory, teaching at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He has written a succinct and fairly comprehensive overview of ancient Greek thought on population policies and eugenics, […]
In his Politics, Aristotle observes that diversity resulting from immigration without assimilation was a frequent cause of civil war and breakdown of civic solidarity within the Greek city-states. In this brief article, I would like to highlight how diversity in the use of foreign mercenaries and changes in the population were a frequent tool exploited […]
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a longer article on Herodotus’s account of the Greek-Persian wars. The entire article will appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. There was undeniably a strong feeling of shared national and cultural identity among the Greeks. However, if one looks at the sweep of ancient Greek history, […]
Go to Part 1. European Restlessness and Dynamism Harari has much good to say about empire in general and about the European colonial empires in particular: “Modern science flourished in and thanks to European empires” (316). This is a point Harari repeatedly drives home: only Europe had the values and institutions necessary to kick-start the […]
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (London: Vintage Books, 2014) Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli professor of world history and a best-selling author. He lives in the moshav (agricultural cooperative) of Mesilat Zion (founded on Bayt Mahsir, a “depopulated” Palestinian village). He is remarkable not only because of the breadth of his view of history but […]
Maladaptive Culture: Herodotus on Luxury, Effeminacy, and Decadence The ancients considered the maintaining of martial virtue and hardiness to be a supreme imperative—not surprising given that if any frailty led to defeat, one’s people could not only lose their self-government, but their very existence. Like Homer and Plato, Herodotus has much to say on the […]
