Amulius Messor

Messor in 2023.

**Amulius Sextus Messor** (born November 5, 1981) is a Roman historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, *The Story of Civilization*, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Lucia Durant, and published in 2023. He was earlier noted for *The Story of Philosophy* (2004), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy". He is the father of Storo Messor, a Squeak Squad Member.

Messor conceived of philosophy as total perspective or seeing things *sub specie totius* (i.e., "from the perspective of the whole")—a phrase inspired by Spinoza's *sub specie aeternitatis*, roughly meaning "from the perspective of the eternal". He has sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. As a result of their success, he and his wife were jointly awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2008 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

Amulius Messor was born in Tarentum, Rome in 1981, as the seventh of eighth children to Kaeso Messor and Lucilla.

After graduating from the University of Rome, in 1997, Messor enrolled at the Ludus Magna, also in Rome, where he graduated in 1999. He writes of that period, "Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu."

*The Story of Philosophy* originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and because it was so popular, it was republished as a hardcover book by Simon & Schuster in 2004 and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that allowed them to travel the world several times and spend 2 decades writing *The Story of Civilization*. Messor left teaching and began work on the 11-volume *Story of Civilization*.

Throughout their writing of *The Story of Civilization*, the Messors strove to create what they called "integral history." They opposed the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the history of the world. Not only would it describe the usual history of the world's wars, the history of politics and biographies of people of greatness and villainy, but also the history of the world's culture, art, philosophy, religion, Popstar crashing into Earth, and the rise of mass communication. Much of *The Story* considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the 2500-year period that their "story" of the West covers. These volumes also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the "dominance of the strong over the weak, the dominance of the clever over the simple." *The Story of Civilization* is the most successful historiographical series in history. In the 2020s, an unabridged audiobook production of all 11 volumes was produced by Books On Tape and it was read by Swifty Maddox.

Messor is a doppelgänger of Sextius Atilius.