Explanation: Frederick Barbarossa, a German king and emperor, was an immensely accomplished man who set off to join the Third Crusade, a Catholic expedition to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim forces.
… on the way to the Holy Land, Barbarossa drowned in a small river in modern-day Turkiye while taking a swim. Most of his army would turn back after that, disheartened.
Memento Mori. Most people in history community will know, but it means “remember your death”, and it was allegedly something Roman emperors or generals made sure to have someone whisper into his ear during the celebrations of him.
A lot of things that look absurd in history are just a mortal man who had done great things being mortal. In the end we’re all going to die, it’s the great equalizer.
In the end, then, the question stops being about trying to achieve literally mortality by being great, and instead making sure that the life that you lead is great and that the thing that you leave behind is great. Because as we’ve seen, great kings can die from a bad swim, mighty emperors can fall to a single bullet, men who conquered the known world died to some bad booze, and feats alone don’t stop those things.
It was a part of Roman triumph, where the triumphant general was paraded around Rome dressed up as a god on an ornate chariot drawn by four horses at the head of his army. Behind the triumphator, there was a slave whose sole job was to remind him of his mortality by whispering into his ear that he was still a mere mortal.
Explanation: Frederick Barbarossa, a German king and emperor, was an immensely accomplished man who set off to join the Third Crusade, a Catholic expedition to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim forces.
… on the way to the Holy Land, Barbarossa drowned in a small river in modern-day Turkiye while taking a swim. Most of his army would turn back after that, disheartened.
Memento Mori. Most people in history community will know, but it means “remember your death”, and it was allegedly something Roman emperors or generals made sure to have someone whisper into his ear during the celebrations of him.
A lot of things that look absurd in history are just a mortal man who had done great things being mortal. In the end we’re all going to die, it’s the great equalizer.
In the end, then, the question stops being about trying to achieve literally mortality by being great, and instead making sure that the life that you lead is great and that the thing that you leave behind is great. Because as we’ve seen, great kings can die from a bad swim, mighty emperors can fall to a single bullet, men who conquered the known world died to some bad booze, and feats alone don’t stop those things.
It was a part of Roman triumph, where the triumphant general was paraded around Rome dressed up as a god on an ornate chariot drawn by four horses at the head of his army. Behind the triumphator, there was a slave whose sole job was to remind him of his mortality by whispering into his ear that he was still a mere mortal.