As St. Petersburg is the Liverpool of Russia, it is intriguing to learn from philologists that the local Liverpudlian accent pronounces hair and heir and hairpiece and herpes the same. Received opinion is that hair loss is in proportion to intelligence. One thinks just off the top of one s head of William Shakespeare, William Cullen Bryant, Herbert Spencer, Octave Cremazie, Wilbur Wright, and Dwight David Eisenhower. The bearded Bard of Avon seems to have been a bit defensive about his alopecia, for he says in his Comedy of Errors , There s many a man hath more hair than wit. It may well be that incorporeal angels would appear to us as totally bald by virtue of their perfect intelligence.
Hair is a liability.
Absalom, never to be equated in IQ with the angels, was doomed when his rampant follicles got caught up the branches of an oak tree. Elisha conjured up two she-bears to tear apart 42 children as punishment for the first bald joke mentioned in history. At Athens, traditionally bald St. Paul converted Dionysius the Areopagite, a man frequently confused with Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, whose writing could have been lost to the world without the Latin translations of Erigena, who was funded in the ninth century by Charles the Bald. St. Paul tolerated hair only when it was covered, and tonsure has long been the style of a life of perfection. Seutonius writes that after vain Julius Caesar s success over Pompey on the plains of Pharsalia, the Roman Senate voted him permission to wear the laurel wreath all the time, thus concealing his bald spot.