This week: Cyrus the Great, Lincoln’s abolitionism, Raphael, modernist literature & more.
King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great, by Matt Waters (Oxford): According to Herodotus, Cyrus the Great was a king through and through. When he was born, his grandfather King Astyages ordered his death on account of a bad omen; as with Oedipus, a herdsman saved the royal child from death by exposure and raised him as a commoner. Unlike Oedipus, though, Cyrus’s nobility revealed itself when he was still a boy: once, when playing with children his age, he was chosen as “king” by his peers, and he proceeded to whip anyone who refused to submit to his orders. (One was the son of an important minster who reported the incident to Astyages, leading to Cyrus’s discovery.) But as ruler of Persia Cyrus was known as much for his beneficence as his severity, as Matt Waters explains in his new book, and his reign was admired not just by subsequent Persians but also Babylonians, Jews, Greeks, and more. He amassed an empire hitherto unparalleled in size, earning the title found on a monument celebrating his victory over the Babylonians in 539 B.C.—“King of the World.” —RE
“The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” featuring James Oakes, at the Bryant Park Reading Room (July 6): Biographies of Abraham Lincoln can present diametrically opposed views on the sixteenth president, with some historians lauding him as the “Great Emancipator” and others lambasting his “embodiment . . . of the American Tradition of racism.” In The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes offers a third, more nuanced account, revealing Lincoln as a man who detested the practice of slavery but stopped short of being a full-fledged abolitionist. On Wednesday evening, Oakes will expound upon this portrayal as part of the “Non-Fiction at the Bryant Park Reading Room” series. The series, which is returning for its thirteenth summer, is produced in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society and features lectures on American history from some of the nation’s top historians. Of particular focus in Oakes’s address will be Lincoln’s use of the Constitution as the basis for his antislavery arguments. —JW
Raphael (World of Art), by Paul Joannides (Thames & Hudson): Joshua Reynolds thought Raphael nonpareil: “The excellence of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty and majesty of his characters, the judicious contrivance of his composition, his correctness of drawing, purity of taste, and skillful accommodation of other men’s conceptions to his purposes. Nobody excelled him in that judgment.” So high was Reynolds’s esteem that when others “talk’d of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,/ He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff”—or so said Oliver Goldsmith. The Raphael exhibition on through the end of the month at the National Gallery in London made Reynolds’s observations abundantly clear. There is a fineness to his work that has never been matched. Those who can’t make it to London but still desire an overview of Raphael’s work should seek out Paul Joannides’s Raphael, part of Thames & Hudson’s “World of Art” series, which offers an illustrated primer and is out now. —BR
“One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’” at the Morgan Library & Museum (through October 2, 2022): The modernist literature of James Joyce, like his iconoclastic Ulysses, shattered fictional norms with its punctuation-less, stream-of-consciousness writing style. To make matters worse for traditionalists, Ulysses
Podcast:
“Music for a While #62: Beyond the sabre.” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
From the archive:
“The colorblind bard: an exchange,” by Solveig Lucia Gold & Dan-el Padilla Peralta (July 2017). An exchange of letters concerning Solveig Gold’s “The colorblind bard” (July 13, 2017).
Dispatch:
“Waiting for the evening train,” by Timothy Jacobson. On the childhood memoirs of Bruce Catton.