What is left to say about the Peleponnesian War, and yet had Sparta waged war on Kerkira and then doted and fawned upon Athens, history may never have witnessed a General Amnesty. More impressive is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not just for his middle name.
First of all, it's pronounced "Bish." Second of all it's an Old English Surname that means "Dweller Near The Marsh." The name Percy means "One Who Pierces The Valley." The name Shelley means "Clearing on a Bank." So what with one thing and another, and the nature of meaning in language, Percy Bysshe Shelley was pretty much baptized for this moment now in US history and his poem called Ozymandias makes huge and immediate sense.
Who was Ozymandias? He was an ancient Egyptian, King Ramesses II, who just thought he was great and proceeded to build a statue of himself. A colossus, gigantic, bloody enormous.
The point is that three thousand years later a sickly boy called Percy Bysshe Shelley, just four years before he died of the White Plague, came across the ruins of Ramesses II's colossus. The statue's surviving inscription was translated for him: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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