Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

[...] Blumenberg reminds us that the mature mythology that we know from Homer, Hesiod, the Ramayana, from our informants in "primitive" cultures, and so on, must be imagined as the product of thousands of years of oral storytelling, in the course of which vastly greater quantities of stories, figures, and variations on earlier stories and figures were tested on audiences upon whose active approval the storyteller's success, perhaps even his livelihood, depended - and that as a result of such "testing" most of these were discarded as not having the impact that the surviving material has. In other words, the stock of myth that has come down to us in the product, not of a reverent process of handing down (such as comes into play with written texts...), but rather of an unsparing process of "natural selection", which Blumenberg in fact entitles the "Darwinism of words."

R.M. Wallace, "Translator's Introduction" in H Blumenberg, Work on Myth, MIT Press, 1985, p. xx

What, then, is the literal sense of this phrase? As was mentioned at the beginning, we are now inclined to translate it as 'I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady.' That is to say, we assume that the et means 'too' and refers to ego, and we further assume that the unexpressed verb stands in the past tense; we thus attribute the whole phrase to a defunct inhabitant of Arcady. All these assumptions are incompatible with the rules of Latin grammar. The phrase Et in Arcadia ego is one of those elliptical sentences like Summum jus summa iniuria, E pluribus unum, Nequid nimis or Sic semper tyrannis, in which the verb has to be supplied by the reader. [...]

The correct translation of the phrase in its orthodox form is, therefore, not 'I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady', but: 'Even in Arcady there am I', from which we must conclude that the speaker is not a deceased Arcadian shepherd or sheperdess but Death in person.

Rackham takes great delight in surprising his reader, often subverting popular notions that have calcified into myth. One old battle he fights is the idea that industry was always the great enemy of trees, and that enterprises such as iron smelting or shipbuilding brought ruin to woodland. The clarification he often repeats is the key difference between felling, from which the wood will recover completely in time, and grubbing out, which removes for ever the means of timber production. [...] He makes plain that what really laid our woods low was their supposed lack of economic value. In the twentieth century, this notion, coupled with an insatiable and partly subsidy-driven demand for the extension of agriculture, as well as the formation of the Forestry Commission in 1919, had baleful consequences. Between 1930 and 1990, Britain lost as much as a half of all the ancient woods that had survived since the time of the Domesday Book.

In 1673, Louis had his Flemish jeweller, Sieur Pitau, undertake the risky task of cleaving then cutting the Tavernier violet down to 67.125 carats, very nearly halving it in size, but doubling its value to 400,000 livres (1691). The cleavings soon vanished, but may have reappeared briefly in the nineteenth century as the so-called Pirie and Brunswick blue diamonds, both of which have since gone to ground. The Tavernier violet stayed with the French crown jewels, and eighty years later, it was mounted...into King Louis XV's elaborate, gem-encrusted badge of the Toison d'or, the Order of the Golden Fleece. [...]

In June 1791 the Toison d'or was confiscated, along with the rest of the French crown jewels, and stored temporarily at the Garde Meuble in Paris. Thence, following a break-in fifteen months later, the jewel was stolen. It may have been an inside job. Old gossip attributes to Georges-Jacques Danton the decision to break the Hope Diamond out of its setting, then use it to bribe the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian and Austrian armies, into retreating from Valmy, where untested revolutionary forces, outnumbered two to one, were preparing to resist invasion, the purpose of which was to rescue the Royal Family. The Prussian and Austrian manoeuvre, apparently otherwise inexplicable, provided the new Government in Paris with much-needed breathing space, and indeed the monarchy was abolished the day after it, on Sep 22, 1792.