Julius Caesar had the strange habit of watching himself think.

His account of the Gallic Wars, De Bello Gallico, was written in the third person: “Caesar did this, Caesar decided that”, as if he were simultaneously the general and the historian, the actor and the critic.

It is a remarkable exercise in self-narration, the tragic leader constructing his own myth in real time.

Clovis had no such luxury, or perhaps no such vanity. He left no memoir.

And yet the questions he raises, about power, legitimacy, and the art of ruling in a world dissolving around him, may be more instructive than anything Caesar wrote. Classical historians gasp in terror at these words.

Clovis was born around 466 AD, son of the Frankish chieftain Childeric I. He inherited a small, rough territory around Tournai, in today’s Belgium, at the time a backwater on the fringes of a Roman Empire already in its death rattle.

By the time he died in 511, he had assembled something that would eventually become France. How was that possible?

Bishop Gregory of Tours, writing his Historia Francorum roughly sixty years after Clovis died, is our primary window. He describes a man who was ruthless and canny, capable of strategic marriages, calculated conversions, and the elimination of rivals with a precision that bordered on the theatrical.

When Clovis defeated Syagrius, the last Roman military governor in the West, at Soissons in 486, he won more than a battle and what followed was more than conquest: it was, I would say, absorption, as Clovis folded surviving Roman administrative structures into his own emerging authority rather than dismantling them.

Gregory records Archbishop Remigius telling Clovis at his baptism around 496: “Burn what you have worshipped, and worship what you have burned.”

The historian Patrick Geary has described Clovis’s conversion to orthodox Christianity as something closer to a political technology than a spiritual event, as it aligned him with the episcopal networks of the Gallo-Roman church, the most durable institutional structure surviving the imperial collapse, while isolating his Arian, non-orthodox rivals.

I offer a further complicatIon. What we usually think of as the “barbarian takeover” of that period was, in many respects, a Roman process. Figures like Clovis operated not against Roman structures but through their residual logic. So was Clovis an innovator or an inheritor? Was he seizing power, or was power simply finding its most competent available vessel?

And there are so many more questions. Did Clovis understand what he was building, or was he simply reacting faster than everyone else? Gregory himself opens his history with the admission that “a great many things keep happening, some good, some bad”, a deceptively simple observation about a world in flux that Clovis, of all the figures of his age, seemed to navigate with the least hesitation.

So next time I hear about leading in uncertainty, navigating the unknown, or about polycrisis, omnicrisis, or BANI-VUCA worlds, I think of millenium-old Clovis, who (consultants gasp!) knew a thing or two about these matters.

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I confess that I return to the Odyssey every summer, and every summer it gives back something new. That is the mark of great storytelling, I think, not repetition, but renewal.

The poem’s central tension is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited.

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What would the greatest orator of the ancient world make of a technology that produces fluent, well-structured prose in seconds?

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Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence reads, in places, like a cry from the wilderness. It warns of disruption, of power concentrated in too few hands, of technologies that outpace our moral frameworks. It calls for restraint. It calls for governance. It calls, in its own careful way, for a kind of peace.

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Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita. In the middle. Not the beginning, not the end. The middle is the hardest place to be, because you can see both directions and feel certain of neither.

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We tend to imagine the loss of ancient literature as catastrophe, dramatic and violent. Libraries engulfed in flames, fanatical monks shredding the works of Plato.

The evidence for this is thin.

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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey began as oral performances, competing in a crowded ecosystem of epic poetry.

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Why is our planet called “Earth” (Terra) when 71% of its surface is covered in water? And when you consider that the human body is itself roughly 60% water, the question becomes stranger still. We named the world after the part of it we stood on, the part that is relevant to us. Science comes last to the party.

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“History is written by the winners” is an evolutionary statement.

Every organism alive carries within it the encoded record of what worked, a compressed archive of successful ad…

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In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European humanists became drunk on Ciceronian wine.

Metaphorically drunk, maybe, but also genuinely intoxicated, philologically and rhetorically, by the rediscovery of classical Latin prose. Prose in itself and for itself.

The effect was electrifying. New ways of thinking about words and clauses unlocked new way…

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No freedom. No notes. No maps. No travel companions to correct his recall. No literary talent. No recent memories. The journeys were decades old. No framework of his own to hold it all together.

Marco Polo left Venice in 1271, aged seventeen, with his father and uncle, both seasoned merchants of the eastern trade. He would not return for 24 years.

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A historical narrative these days can take many forms. It can be popular or academic, narrative or analytical, sympathetic or forensic. It can engage with the eviden…

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