Longreads

An extended conversation with the legendary linguist Graham Gordon Ramsay If one were to rank a list of civilization's greatest and most elusive intellectual challenges, the problem of "decoding"…

In ancient Rome, walking was a marker of culture and status.:

"No less remarkable, for Strabo, was the bafflement some of these poor Spaniards felt at the day-to-day habits of their new Roman allies or conquerors. One group of tribesmen, he explained, visiting a Roman camp and seeing some generals taking a stroll, “walking up and down the road”, thought they were “mad and tried to take them back into their tents”, either to sit down and rest, or get up and fight. Despite Strabo’s patronizing tone, it’s one of those rare occasions where we can catch a glimpse of the barbarian point of view on the Romans. The Spaniards presumably thought that walking was something that got a person from A to B (or from tent to battleground). What on earth then were these Roman generals doing as they ambled around, chatting, but not actually going anywhere?"

"You wouldn’t have caught the stereotypical Roman absent-mindedly falling into a well, like the Greek sage Thales, while wandering about, lost in his own thoughts. And when, in the second century BC, a visiting academic from Pergamum slipped into a drain at Rome and broke his leg, that must have seemed a typically Greek kind of accident. Romans might have ambled up and down, chatting as they went, in a very non-barbarian way, but they also looked where they were going."