HKB
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Often appears with: language, naming, and meaning · diplomacy and embassies · conspiracy and assassination · æmona statues incident · turning out of doors · thomas paine · rights and liberties · reputation · pudentilla’s sanity and conduct · justice as a virtue · honor, shame, and reputation · greek and letter-reading ability
Usually: argument (2) · skepticism (2) · letter or document (1) · narrative (1) · betrayal (1) · crisis of belief (1) · deception discovered (1) · temptation (1) · censure (1) · detachment (1)
“And yet a year had scarcely elapsed after the death of Maximin, before the victorious emperors turned their arms against each other.” Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire · insight
“My ease, my domestic happiness, my rural pleasures, my little property, my personal liberty, my reputation, my life, have little weight and ever had in my own estimation, in comparison with the great object of my country.” John Adams (as compiled/edited by Charles Francis Adams), Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail · insight
Gibbon argues the Roman world is split between Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East, but they soon turn on each other: Licinius allegedly plots through Bassianus, refuses to surrender fugitives, and sparks conflict via incidents at Æmona.
conditio exitio fuit. Lactantius de M. P. c. 51. He relates the misfortunes of the innocent wife and daughter of Discletian with a very natural mixture of pity and exultation.] The Roman world was now divided between Constantine and Licinius, the former of whom was master of the West, and the latter of the East. It might perhaps have been expected that the conquerors, fatigued with civil war, and c…
John Adams responds to Abigail’s letters, praises her secrecy, recounts his devotion to American interests over personal comfort, and assesses Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—approving its sense while criticizing its constitutional plans.
persons and places, or any other circumstances which might designate to strangers the writer, or the person written to, or the persons mentioned. Characters and description will do as well. The lie which you say occasioned such disputes at the tavern was curious enough. Who could make and spread it? I am much obliged to an uncle for his friendship. My worthy fellow-citizens may be easy about me. I never can forsake …
Apuleius rejects the claim that he seduced Pudentilla by flattery, denies a forged letter, explains why someone would read an easier version of a love letter, and says Pudentilla remained mentally sharp after writing it.
which Pudentilla wrote in Greek altogether too refined for his comprehension, found it easier to read this letter and set it off to greater advantage because it was his own. One more point and I shall have said enough about the letters. Pudentilla, after writing in jest and irony those words 'Come then, while I am yet in my senses', sent for her sons and her daughter-in-law and lived with them for about two months. …
After her lover notices she has been crying, Moll tells him the women intend to turn her out, and he reassures her they suspect Robin (the elder brother) rather than him or their secret.
out a-visiting, just as it had happened before, and as indeed was often the case, he came according to his custom, to spend an hour or two with Mrs. Betty. When he came and had sat down a while, he easily perceived there was an alteration in my countenance, that I was not so free and pleasant with him as I used to be, and particularly, that I had been a-crying; he was not long before he took notice of it, and asked …