"Ask not what your country can do for you . . . "

I can't believe it.

John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to service is being attributed to Mussolini over at Instapundit, complete with an Italian translation of the Kennedy quotation. For the genesis of the passage, the JFK Library has a page available here.

As further illustration of how unreliable online reference sites can be, the Instapundit post has an added link to a site that attributes the quote to -- Cicero! (though Kennedy's inaugural address has often been described as Ciceronian in style).

ADDENDUM: It won't end! I've now found a page that claims Khalil Gibran as the author; another that attributes it to Juvenal.

PS: And then there's the other question: chiasmus, or antimetabole?

Roman military tombstone to be unveiled

A NATIONALLY important Roman tombstone discovered in Lancaster will be returning to the city next month.

The memorial for a Roman soldier is due to arrive at Lancaster City Museum on October 12 after months of conservation work in Preston.

Discovered during an excavation in Aldcliffe Road in 2005, the giant tombstone is thought to be in memory of Lucius Nisus Vodullius, a trooper in a Roman army. It depicts a figure on horseback decapitating a man.

MORE details here; excerpt:

At almost six feet in height, the massive stone clearly depicts a carved Roman cavalryman riding with the severed head of a barbarian enemy in his hand. A Latin inscription reveals the cavalryman to be Insus Vodullus, an ‘eques’ or mounted trooper of the auxiliary cavalry unit ala Augusta. His decapitated victim is revealed as a citizen of the Treveri tribe, from the Trier area of western Germany.

Though the stone bears no clear date, such as the year of the emperor’s reign in which it was erected, circumstantial evidence points to a date somewhere between 75 and AD 125. Most similar stones are from the first century AD and the unit name has been previously associated with the North West of England during the latter part of this period.

But what makes the stone particularly interesting to archaeologists is its condition. When first examined in situ, red dye was still apparent highlighting the inscription whilst the carved image was virtually unweathered.

Horny carnivores!

Recently excavated dinosaur bones reveal that the most common large predatory dinosaurs in South America during the Cretaceous period were the abelisaurids, a group that included some of the most well-armed and fierce-looking carnivores that ever lived.

The new fossils -- the first-ever dinosaur bones to be unearthed at the Marilia Formation in Bauru Basin, Brazil -- could belong to one or more new species, but paleontologists suspect they may be the remains of Carnotaurus sastrei, a dinosaur that, in recent years, has become one of Hollywood's favorite animal villains.

Returned Ethiopian obelisk unveiled

Ethiopia is celebrating the unveiling of the reassembled Axum obelisk, one of the country's greatest treasures.

The obelisk, at least 1,700 years old, was looted by Italian troops in the 1930s and returned to Ethiopia in 2005. . .

Intricately carved obelisks were erected at the tombs of Ethiopia's ancient kings when Axum was the centre of a great empire.

But only one remained standing amid the tumbled blocks of its former companions. . .

Royal vermin, ahoy!

REMAINS of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship. That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world.

Archaeologist Thomas Cucchi of the University of Durham, UK, identified a fragment of a mouse jaw in sediment from a ship that sank 3500 years ago off the coast of Turkey.