Smaller but Smarter

"After all of his students had gone home for the summer and the college was closed, Uncle Martin would come to visit us on the Cape.  Most days he acquiesced to our breakfast-time pleas that he take us to the beach and, in the evenings, while Mama and Father sat on the porch talking to neighbors, he would tell us stories inspired by little collections of things that we gathered from all over the house.   Of course, we would try to stump him with the most silly and unlikely sets of objects, but we never did succeed--after a few seconds, never more than the time it took to take in a breath, he would start in with a story, usually set in some exotic land in the distant past.  Although, when Franklin and I recall those evenings now we realize that the stories Martin told us were not always entirely of his own invention.  I think all of the books in the whole world, or at least an enormous library full of them, must have lived in his head."  Kit Maar (1946)

"Not until they assembled on the plain for battle did the Phrygians realize their error--they had depended solely on their greater size for the advantage, but the much smaller and more clever Carians had come to the contest armed with a large and ominous new weapon that glinted in the sunlight and so terrified their opponents that they surrendered before a single blow had been delivered."  Suetonius, On The Physical Defects of Mankind.