Twenty-Five Years for Salman Rushdie’s Attacker

Also: “Ellmann’s Joyce,” how ancient Rome endured, the relevance of Pascal, in praise of Graham Swift, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning. Salman Rushdie’s attacker has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. Scott Neuman reports: “Hadi Matar, the man who severely injured novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 stabbing attack, was sentenced Friday to 25 years in prison — the maximum for attempted murder . . . Judge David Foley also sentenced Matar to 7 years, to be served concurrently, for injuring the moderator who tried to stop the attack.” How many years will he actually serve?

How ancient Rome endured: “In 217 BC, at Lake Trasimene in Etruria, the Carthaginian general Hannibal had trapped and massacred one of Rome’s two consular armies, killing or capturing 25,000 men. Then, bypassing Rome itself, Hannibal marched south, devastating Campania and wintering in Apulia. The consuls of 216, each with an army tens of thousands strong, found him there next spring and brought him to battle at Cannae. Anchoring one flank on the line of the river Aufidus, Hannibal pulled off a perfect encirclement, luring the Roman legions to his retiring centre and then wrapping around them with Numidian, Spanish and Gallic cavalry. In the slaughter that followed at least 50,000 were killed, including one of the consuls and about a third of Rome’s senators. Only a few thousand men escaped. And yet Rome recovered. One of the marvels of ancient history is the Roman willingness to sustain heavy casualties, raise yet more soldiers and sacrifice them, too, rather than accept a losing peace. No other ancient state behaved like that. The expansive Roman approach to granting citizenship, as well as fortunate demography, are part of the explanation, but it is also the flip side of the implacable destruction that Roman armies were all too happy to unleash. And so Rome survived Cannae. Its control of the sea denied Hannibal supplies and reinforcements from North Africa, while a new strategy of shadowing his movements but refusing battle prolonged the war in Italy for more than a decade.”