About the work

A closer look.

Give me one thing you keep hearing: a historical 'fact', a famous quote, a legend, a custom, an origin story. I chase it back through the real record to its earliest telling. What the oldest sources actually say. Where the story entered the written record. Where it goes quiet, and who filled the silence. You get a plain written trail, every source named so you can open them yourself. If a version can be dated to print, a mistranslation or a repeated error, I show you exactly where it starts. If the record genuinely cannot answer your question, I tell you before you pay and you owe nothing. Examples of the kind of thing I do: a legend everyone treats as ancient that first appears in a Victorian encyclopedia; a famous last line that a playwright wrote 1,600 years later; a curse that no ancient source ever mentions.