This week, Burckhardt's The Age of Constantine the Great has been serving as bathroom reading. Just reading about Septimius Severus:

"Despite its importance and its indispensable military significance as a stronghold against the barbarians of Pontus, Byzantium, where Pescennius' followers had defended themselves for a year, was razed to the ground, and its garrison, along with many of its inhabitants, was put to death. The world must be given an example of the fate of cities and factions which could not immediately choose among a number of rival usurpers that one who deserved enduring obedience.

Albinus' followers fared no better. Severus had come into possession of their correspondence; he might have burned the letters unread, as Caesar had burned the letters of the Pompeians. That would have been a generous gesture, but altogether unsuitable to the times; the question was no longer one of divergent principles and their amalgamation through reconciliation and persuasion, but simply of subjection. A crowd of senators and other notables in and out of Rome were executed; the Emperor delivered eulogies of Commodus before the Senate, people, and army, surely not out of conviction but in mockery of the Senate. In Rome itself, during this struggle for dominion, a spontaneous lamenting and wailing once broke out at the Circus games; an eyewitness could find no explanation for the phenomenon other than divine inspiration. 'O Rome, Queen, Immortal,' the multitudes shouted with a single voice, 'how long shall we suffer these things, how long will war be waged over us?' Ignorance of their future was the happier lot."

Strange resonances, everything a sign of something else, widely disparate items put into relationships that seem obvious and arbitrary by turn, little dioramas, sudden zooms, animation, dissolution. O Cardamom, Queen of Spices!