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Reminiscent of the Believers who insist 2 First Century letters that mention Jesus are "proof" he existed -- overlooking the fact that what they actually reference is the WORSHIP of Jesus, and if that was all it took, we could take Zeus and Odin and Krishna and a whole bunch of other gods as fact!

Except she knows how to spell Pharaoh.

   After wrapping up a compilation of the surviving writings of Polybius (most of which are actually fragmentary), I've since moved over to Sallust.  Classical literature still has very much an appeal to me since I started reading it several years back, and it provides a window into the past to show us that man really hasn't changed all that much over the centuries.  As in the declining century of republican Rome, politicians will still smear their opponents and bemoan the state of things, while participating in the actions which accelerated that decline as old Crispus did.

   The gist of the narratives by Sallust that I'm reading now is a series of events that shook the Roman world in the later 2nd and mid-1st Centuries BCE.  One of these was an attempted coup by a would-be revolutionary named Catalinus (hence the title "Cataline's War") in 63 BCE.  The other was the revolt of the Numidians in northern Africa that was crushed by the consul Marius in 104 BCE.  Both are monograms written about the events, joined by an incomplete history that shares the theme of increasing decadence and decline in republican values as Rome closed in on the day when Augustus would begin the reign of autocratic emperors.  Perhaps not-so ironically, the writer himself was a part of all the shenanigans which marked these decades of Roman rule, having been tossed from the Senate on corruption charges himself at one time.

I just picked up Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything" from my library.