CLASSICAL CORNER
250: DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN
(As Yankees’ baseball legend Yogi Berra famously said)
My début in these pages (FT129:51) came in the form of a letter, pointing to a little-known ancient parallel to Fort’s stories (Books, pp.884-91) of men and women in various cities and countries in the early 20th century being randomly stabbed by hat-pins, sometimes poisoned.
In AD 91, during the reign of Domitian, the Græco-Roman historian Dio Cassius (, bk57 ch11 para6) thus avers: “Some persons made a business of smearing needles with poison and then pricking with them whomsoever they would. Many persons attacked in this way died without even knowing the cause, but
