Hollywood Was Dying

hollywood-sign-1978-LAPL.jpg

                                                                            Hollywood Sign: 1978

Today's selection -- from Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman. Movie attendance peaked at 78.2 million a week in 1946, but had declined to a mere 15.8 million by 1971:


 “On April 14, 1969, a tuxedoed Gregory Peck strode across the empty lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion like a weary cowboy crossing abandoned prairie. Peck had become Academy president two years earlier, and his job was to introduce the Forty-First Academy Awards. On camera, Peck descended a mirrored staircase in the atrium, looked around with his thick eyebrows furrowed, and pronounced in his deep, godlike voice, ‘It's kind of lonesome out here. The audience is already on the inside.’ 


“The cameras cut to the stage, where Frank Sinatra crooned the title song from Star!, a new Julie Andrews vehicle from 20th Century-Fox. The most nominated films that year were the splashy studio musicals Oliver! and Funny Girl, whose star, Barbra Streisand, showed up to the ceremony in a see-through pantsuit. Streisand was a new kind of old star—’ethnic,’ but with showbiz chops. In an effort to make the Oscar broadcast less lugubrious, Peck had hired stage director Gower Champion. In place of Bob Hope, hosting duties were shared by ‘Oscar's best friends,’ among them Ingrid Bergman, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, and, for the youth vote, Jane Fonda, her short hair marcelled for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?


“When Bergman opened the Best Actress envelope, she found a shocker: Streisand had tied with Katharine Hepburn, for The Lion in Winter. Because Hepburn was absent, Streisand, who was ten days away from twenty-seven, had no chance of being upstaged. She cooed to her statuette, ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ Oliver! won five awards, including Best Picture. Only six months earlier, the MPAA had instituted a new rating system, replacing the old Production Code after three and a half decades. Oliver! was rated G, designating it as the kind of wholesome studio entertainment that could be enjoyed by ‘general audiences,’ whoever that was.

Peck in 1948


“But a closer look revealed another Hollywood—and a more unconventional kind of movie—clawing at the gates. Rosemary's Baby was nominated only for Roman Polanski's screenplay and for Ruth Gordon, who won Best Supporting Actress. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey had managed four nominations, Best Picture not among them, and won for special effects—the only Oscar that Kubrick would ever receive. And sitting next to Streisand was her estranged husband, the little-known Elliott Gould, wearing the droopy mustache he had grown for Robert Altman's M*A*S*H.


“After the awards, congratulations on a smashing show poured into Peck's Academy mailbox. ‘At a time when the morals within movies are being pushed to the outer edges of chaos,’ Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, awards for the likes of Oliver! ‘reassure everyone in the industry that all is well, that Hollywood really isn't some giant bordello that's about to be raided.’


“He spoke too soon. Just a year later, Gould would be nominated for a movie about spouse swapping, Fonda would hold up a fist on the red carpet, hippie frocks would turn the Oscar stage psychedelic, and the winning picture would be rated X.


“Beneath the gilded schmaltz, Hollywood was falling apart. Movie attendance, which had peaked at 78.2 million a week in 1946, was on a downward slide that would bottom out at 15.8 million by 1971. The old studios, desperate to distinguish themselves from television, had spent the decade filling screens with musical extravaganzas and Spartacus-like words-and-sandals epics that displayed the industry's bloat, but they had little idea how to speak to anyone younger than Streisand. Star! Would lose $15 million and all seven of its nominations, hammering another nail into the coffin of Hollywood's business model since 1965: re-create the success of The Sound of Music. Popular music didn't sound like Oliver! anymore. Vietnam had marred the innocence of Doctor Dolittle. The sixties were almost over, and Hollywood still hadn't caught up.


“Despite a wave of corporate takeovers, the last of the golden age moguls held the studios in an arthritic fist. In 1966, Jack Warner, at seventy-four, had sold his controlling interest in Warner Bros. to Seven Arts Productions—but he ran the studio until late 1969. Daryl Zanuck,

in his late sixties, remained on the throne of 20th Century-Fox, having installed his son, Dick Zanuck, as head of production in 1962. At Paramount, newly acquired by Gulf and Western, Adolph Zukor, in his nineties, and Barney Balaban, in his eighties, sat on the board, which Zukor would chair until his death in 1976 at the age of 103.”

Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
 
author: Michael Schulman  
title: Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears  
publisher: Harper  
date:  
page(s): 223-225

Federal Powers That Should Not Exist

Americans Are Fighting For Control Of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist

Today’s federal government is almost entirely unconstitutional

It’s no secret that politics in the United States is growing increasingly acrimonious — to the point that a 2022 poll found 43% of Americans think a civil war is a least somewhat likely in the next decade.

But here’s what few people realize: The intensity of our division springs from a federal government operating far beyond the limits of the Constitution — fueling a fight for control over powers that were never supposed to exist at the national level.

To put it another way, if the federal government were confined to its actual granted authorities, federal elections would be of little interest to the general public, because the outcome would be largely irrelevant to their everyday lives.


America’s founders drafted the Constitution with great trepidation. Having just escaped British tyranny, the people of the separate states that would comprise the proposed union were wary of centralizing too much power at the federal level, and thus sowing the seeds of a new tyranny.

They therefore set out to create a federal government to which the states delegated only certain limited powers, with all other subjects of governance reserved to the states.

Those powers — only 18 of them — are listed, one by one, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. They include such things as the power to raise armies, maintain a navy, declare war, borrow money, coin money, establish punishments for counterfeiters and pirates, set standards of weights and measures, secure patents and establish post offices.

Reassuring those who were considering the enormously consequential decision of whether to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote,

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. [Federal powers] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce…The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.”

To win over those would-be ratifiers who still feared the proposed federal government would undercut state sovereignty and infringe individual liberties, ten amendments were drafted — the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment codified Madison’s previous assurance about the division of authorities between the federal and state governments:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

We arrive then at a hard fact: Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.

To rattle off just a random fistful of the federal government’s unauthorized undertakings and entities — brace yourself — there is zero constitutional authority for the Social Security, Medicare, federal drug prohibitions, the Small Business Administration, crop subsidies, the Department of Labor, automotive fuel efficiency standards, climate regulations, the Federal Reserve, union regulation, housing subsidies, the Department of Agriculture, workplace regulations, the Department of Education, federal student loans, the Food and Drug Administration, food stamps, unemployment insurance or light bulb regulations. Even that sampling doesn’t begin to fully account for the scope of the unsanctioned activity.

Don’t let your affinity for any of those enterprises short-circuit your intellectual honesty: Even if you view some of them as benign, that doesn’t render them constitutional. And if you’ve ever invoked the Constitution to spotlight a different kind of government overreach, it would be hypocritical to nod approvingly when it’s violated in ways where you deem the result beneficial.

So how did we get to this place where the intended relationship between federal and state powers has been completely inverted — with a federal government wielding powers that are now “numerous and indefinite” rather than being “few and defined”?

Much of the current state of affairs has been driven by the Supreme Court’s extreme and expansive interpretations of certain clauses of the Constitution. Among the most significant are the General Welfare and Commerce clauses.

The General Welfare Clause, found at the start of Article 1, Section 8, says:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…

Embedded in a clause focused on the power to tax, the words “general welfare” were meant to ensure that Congress’s taxation and spending would be confined to purposes that were broadly beneficial, rather than catering to narrow or localized interests.

The clause’s language was copied from the Articles of Confederation, where, as Madison explained, “it was always understood as nothing more than a general caption to the specified powers.” Indeed, he said, it was copied for the very reason that its prior use and understanding would hopefully minimize the risk of it being misinterpreted as a grant of power.

It flies in the face of reason that the drafters of the Constitution would take pains to carefully list the Congress’s specific authorities, yet simultaneously say Congress could also do anything it thinks generally beneficial.

Countering those who sought to interpret the clause that way, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “To consider the…phrase…as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.”

Clearly, based on context and history, those two words, general welfare, do not bestow an authority. Indeed, they’re present to limit an authority — the power to tax and spend.

The forces seeking to reshape the federal government by exploiting those two words were held at bay, but only for so long. In 1937, the Supreme Court used the imaginatively expansive interpretation of the General Welfare Clause to turn back a constitutional challenge to the Social Security Act — and to set a precedent that would fundamentally change the nature of our federal government.

That decision — Helvering v. Davis — came as the court was under intense institutional duress. Following a wave of high court decisions rightly striking down various pieces of New Deal legislation as unconstitutional, President Roosevelt — emboldened by his massive landslide reelection in 1936 — pushed a legislative scheme that would enable him to appoint as many as six more justices to the Supreme Court.

Whether to derail that plan or to merely cave to the overwhelming public opinion manifested in FDR’s jaw-dropping 523-8 electoral college landslide, the court — thanks in great part to swing-vote Justice Owen J. Roberts — began stamping its approval on New Deal legislation, with Helvering among the first.

Fittingly for a ruling that eviscerated limited government in America, Helvering’s very language had its own air of authoritarianism:

“Congress may spend money in aid of the ‘general welfare.’ There have been great statesmen in our history who have stood for other views. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision.”

As if that proclamation didn’t do enough to demolish the concept of limited federal government, the court proceeded to amplify the damage. While acknowledging that determining what falls under “general welfare” requires discretion, the court declared, “the discretion…is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress.” Thus, the court not only granted broad new power to Congress, but also limited the extent to which that power would be subject to checks and balances.

We don’t have to imagine how the “Father of the Constitution” would feel about the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the welfare clause. In 1792, Madison wrote, “The federal government has been hitherto limited to the specified powers…If not only the means, but the objects [purposes] are unlimited, the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”


While the Welfare Clause has been abused to expand federal spending power, Commerce Clause abuse has unleashed sprawling federal regulatory power. As with the Welfare Clause, what was meant to curtail government intrusion into the lives of Americans has perversely been used to expand it.

The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court’s sham interpretation focuses on “among the several states.”

It’s important to consider that the Constitution was drafted to replace the Articles of Confederation. Among the woes that prompted that evolution was the imposition of tariffs by individual states against other states. The Commerce Clause was intended to enable a free trade zone within the union, by empowering Congress to bar interstate tariffs.

“It grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing,” wrote Madison, “and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.”

Those working to expand federal authority have argued that “commerce” doesn’t merely apply to trade, but also encompasses manufacturing and agriculture or even “all gainful activity.”

However, in the constitutional ratification debates, the word “commerce” uniformly and narrowly referred only to mercantile trade or exchange — not to manufacturing, agriculture or retail sales, much less to any gainful activity.

Thomas Jefferson underscored the intended scope of the clause:

“The power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.”

However, the Commerce Clause is now used to justify federal regulation of nearly every aspect of our existence, including activities that happen entirely within a single state. On this front, the Supreme Court did its greatest harm with its 1942 decision in Wickard v Filburn.

In a move that would leave founding farmers aghast, the federal government had fined Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn for growing more wheat on his small farm than allowed by the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938.

Filburn wasn’t even growing the wheat for sale — only to feed his own family and animals, and for future planting. This clearly wasn’t commerce as meant by the Constitution’s authors and ratifiers, to say nothing of the fact that Filburn’s activity lacked any interstate character whatsoever.

That didn’t stop the Supreme Court from upholding the law on Commerce Clause grounds. The court creatively declared that, by choosing not to buy wheat in the marketplace, individuals like Filburn could collectively have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

As Rand Paul wrote in a 2012 Supreme Court amicus filing, “Wickard stands for the sad proposition that Congress can prevent a man from feeding his family in his own home with food he grew himself.” Of course, it does far more than that, serving as a key precedent that subjects any activity to the federal government’s control and punishment. All that’s needed is a theoretical, tangential link to the economy — something every single aspect of life has to some degree.


We’d be far better off had the founding arrangement endured. The decentralization of power and governance reduces political discord and results in more people being governed in ways they find agreeable. If our federalism matched the constitutional design, we’d see citizens focusing most of their political energy on state and local governments — where they have far more meaningful representation compared to the federal legislature, which now has the average House member representing 761,000 people.

If state law, rather than federal law, were preeminent on the vast majority of topics, we’d also see sharper differentiations in what life is like in each of the 50 states. Americans would be presented with a more diverse selection of places to live, while enjoying the freedom to choose the one that best comports with their views on how things should be.

As it is, the Supreme Court-enabled concentration of power in Washington locks us all into a massive, winner-take-all steel-cage match, forcing us to fight over who gets to impose their philosophy on 332 million people across 3.8 million square miles of territory.

Even when the states comprising the union were far fewer in number and occupied far less territory, the prospect of centralized government was anathema to the likes of George Mason. At Virginia’s ratifying convention, he asked“Is it to be supposed that one national government will suit so extensive a country, embracing so many climates, and containing inhabitants so very different in manners, habits, and customs?”

How can we close the Pandora’s box the Supreme Court has opened? Though HelveringWickard and similar decisions are objectively outrageous, it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court setting things right by overturning them.

There’s another long-shot avenue — amending the Constitution. Under Article V, a constitutional amendment convention must be convened if two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures call for one. Such a movement is already underway: As I previously covered, 19 states have now requested a convention, with one of the goals being to limit federal jurisdiction and power.

If we don’t bend the union back into proper shape, it will surely break under the pressure of intensifying discontent with concentrated power and one-size-fits-all governance. Barring a burst of constitutional-amendment momentum, expect the country’s simmering secession movements to grow far more substantial and numerous.

Sloshing Them With Martinis

Today's selection -- from Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng. Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener gained everlasting British military fame in Sudan in the Battle of Omdurman when his forces lost fewer than 500 men while killing—some would say slaughtering—about 11,000 and wounding 16,000:


“As head of the Egyptian army, Kitchener was the only candidate for the command of the force which would reconquer Sudan. His hour had come. As Lord Cromer remembered, Kitchener at forty-six was 'young, energetic, ardently and exclusively devoted to his profession'. He also observed, as many others did, that the Sirdar's qualities did not inspire love among his troops. According to Cromer, the 'bonds which united' Kitchener and his subordinates were those of 'stern discipline'. Kitchener had a 'strong and masterful spirit', which he used to dominate his men and bully them to submission to his will, instead of obtaining from them 'the affectionate obedience yielded to the behests of a genial chief'. Kitchener left as little ‘as possible to chance’ and was, in the language of the period, a ‘rigid economist’, which meant that he was very careful with money, suppressing with ‘a heavy hand any tendency towards waste and extravagance’. 


“The most famous description of Kitchener from this period comes from the stirring account of the Sudan campaign written by G. W. Steevens, entitled With Kitchener to Khartoum, which was a bestseller in 1898. A brilliant Oxford Classics graduate, Steevens was a journalist of genius who worked for the newly founded popular newspaper the Daily Mail and wrote with a vividness and fluency which brought him early fame as a war correspondent, before he died in South Africa at the premature age of thirty. His sketch of Kitchener included the line: ‘You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1 ... the Sudan Machine.’ The ‘Sudan Machine’ was a name that stuck. Steevens referred to the Sirdar's ‘unerring precision’, and it was clear that his characteristics were beginning to fascinate the wider public, as the final resolution of the Sudan conflict became more widely anticipated. A great popular journalist, Steevens appreciated the Victorian public's appetite for supermen and imperial heroes. For him, Kitchener was quite simply ‘the man of destiny’. Against such a man, with the backing of the resources of the imperial government in London, the Khalifa and his followers, it was believed, stood little chance. Lord Cromer had mentioned the inevitability of a British triumph in a letter to Lord Salisbury written in 1892: ‘The very name of England is far more feared by the Khalifa and his Beggara than either Turkey or Egypt, and it is practically admitted that they cannot hope for success in fighting against the British.’

A portrait of Field Marshal Kitchener in full dress uniform taken shortly after being promoted to the rank


“The details of the Sudan campaign, which were recounted in numerous memoirs and descriptions, were once familiar to the British public. The one episode that is still renowned is the Battle of Omdurman, the final stand of the dervishes, made famous by the Charge of the 21st Lancers, the last occasion on which the British army made use of a cavalry charge in battle. Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer who had cajoled and bullied his way on to Kitchener's campaign, would refer to the charge frequently as one of his repertoire of dinner-table anecdotes. It has become part of British military folklore. The Battle of Omdurman itself, which took place on 2 September 1898, was a heavily lopsided affair: at about six in the morning, the dervishes began their advance on the British position. Their ‘array was perfect’, and a great number of their flags, which had been covered with texts from the Koran, were visible on the horizon. To the young Churchill, ‘their admirable alignment made this division of the Khalifa's army look like the old representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry'. The outcome of all this medieval pageantry and theatre was grisly, and, in accounts of the battle, one can almost detect the sense of wonder and shame the British felt in inflicting so much damage on a brave enemy, since the Victorian cult of the hero was more than matched by a passion for 'sportsmanship' and 'good form'. These were, after all, times when the veneration of cricket was perhaps at its height, when the cricket legend W.G. Grace was arguably the most famous man in Britain. The dervishes had been sportsmen: 'our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb', recounted Steevens. Churchill admitted that the 'Dervishes fought manfully'. The famous charge, in which 400 cavalrymen of the 21st Lancers attacked a force of what turned out to be 2,500 dervishes, made very little difference to the outcome of the battle, though it led to the award of three Victoria Crosses. In reality the dervishes were 'swept away in thousands by the deadly fire of the rifles and Maxims'. Their losses were 'terrible': out of an army whose strength was estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000 men, some 11,000 were killed, and about 16,000 wounded. The British casualties had been negligible: twenty-two men and NCOs killed, and a hundred wounded, while only two officers lost their lives, one of whom, Lieutenant Robert Grenfell, had been the 'life and soul of the joyous Christmas festivities' at Lord Cramer's house in Cairo the year before. Grenfell had been killed by a 'Dervish broadsword' while taking part in the charge. Colonel Frank Rhodes, a Times journalist and Cecil Rhodes's elder brother, was also wounded in the battle. The Khalifa struggled on for another year before being killed in the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899.


“The Battle of Omdurman marks the end of an era of military adventurism and battlefield heroics. It was a day of frightful carnage for the dervish tribesmen, but it would, perhaps ironically, be dwarfed by the 20,000 dead the British themselves suffered on the first day of the Somme, less than eighteen years after Omdurman. Later observers reflected on this macabre symmetry. The constant theme of the battle is the contrast between what the British called civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. Churchill summed this up when he described Omdurman as the 'most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.'"

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World
 
author: Kwasi Kwarteng  
title: Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World  
publisher: PublicAffairs  
date:  
page(s): 227-229

The Romans Conquer Sicily


“From Messena the Romans proceeded, logically enough, to the Aeolian Islands. For a couple of centuries the people of the little town of Lipari had been living prosperously and quietly, but as the Romans drew closer the Aeolians allied themselves to the Carthaginians. General Hannibal won a victory here over the Roman fleet. In vain, for in 252 the Romans occupied the obsidian islet. 


“Lilibaeum's thwarting of Pyrrhus was a tiny hors d'oeuvre to the Carthaginians before the Romans swept down to devour them. For over two hundred years, ever since a treaty of 508 between Rome and Carthage, the two powers had observed an understanding with regard to the North African coast and nearby trade routes. Since then the military environment had changed in two relevant ways. First, in the Battle of Himera in 480 the Greeks had triumphed over the Carthaginians — true, that was two centuries before, but the Carthaginians had never regained their aura of invincibility. Second, the Romans had grown into a powerful nation; now they controlled virtually all the Italic peninsula. Their next logical move would be to cross the strait. Carthage, with a military presence on Sicily, was the most powerful city in the western Mediterranean, and Rome took that as a challenge. 


“From Messena the Roman legions spread relentlessly south and west. In 263 they made a puppet of Siracusae's ruler. The same year they conquered Katane, and then, moving westward into the interior, they won the alliance of Centuripe, and in 258 they sacked Enna. On the south coast, Akragas was now a town of the Carthaginians; the Romans besieged Akragas for six months in 262-61 and finally conquered the city. East of Akragas, the Romans in 258 stumbled on the largely destroyed Camarina, and with equipment supplied by Siracusae flattened what little was standing there. 


“The Romans, rapid and ruthless on land, recognized their inferiority to the Carthaginians on the sea. In 261 an opportunity came to the Romans and they seized it: they captured a Carthaginian ship (a quinquereme, with five levels of oarsmen) and had their carpenters duplicate it exactly, a hundred times ... in just a couple of months. Now the Romans had a fleet worthy of them. 


“On land the Romans continued their advance. Compared to their progressions in the east and south, they encountered greater resistance as they moved westward along the north shore, that is, as they moved closer to the Carthaginians. Still, the Romans conquered: in 252 Thermae Himerae and the following year Panormus, heretofore central to the Carthaginian defenses. In 250 the Romans arrived in great force at Lilibaeum and surrounded her by land and sea. Then they discovered that they absolutely could not breach that famous wall. 

Hannibal Crossing of the Alps


“The Romans established a naval blockade; which they maintained for a year until they lost ninety ships in a defeat up north and decided to leave Lilibaeum temporarily. Roman soldiers found it impossible to reach Lilibaeum by land because of the Carthaginian guerrillas in the interior; from 247 to 242 the Carthaginians were under the command of the skillful Hamilcar Barca from his nest in the hills northeast of Lilibaeum. The Romans renewed their blockade in 242, with two hundred ships, new or newly equipped. 


“The Carthaginians brought in reinforcements. The Romans may have had two hundred ships, but the Carthaginians had twice that number, which they deployed to the west and north of Lilibaeum. 


“Over the waters, dense with ships out to the Egadi Islands, the captains communicated with each other by using smoke signals. Although the Carthaginian ships were bigger and swifter than most of the Roman, the Carthaginians needed more room to maneuver. Bringing in their ships from the north, the Romans immobilized the Carthaginians between the Roman ships and the land. Most of the Carthaginian ships were sunk or captured in this Battle of the Egadi, which the Romans won on March 10, 241 B.C.


“Lilibaeum was now a Roman city. It was clear to all concerned, Romans and Carthaginians alike, that the sea too was now Roman, and therefore also the Sicilian shores where the Carthaginians had a few remaining strongholds. From their redoubt at Eryx, their leader Hamilcar Barca sued for peace. The ensuing treaty gave to Rome all the Carthaginian territory in Sicily and its minor islands, and huge reparations. The Romans had won all of Magna Graecia; here on the west coast of Sicily the Romans grasped the Mediterranean world.

The Carthaginians, now effectively dead as a people, wrote no history.”


Author: Sandra Benjamin
Title: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History
Publisher: Steerforth
Date: Copyright 2024
page(s): 72-74