QUI ACCIPERINT GLADIUM is a two-part historical and cultural study as well as celebration of living art. Issued as a limited fundraising run in print and digital copy in the spirit of the Church’s votive tradition and in celebration of sovereign liberty and patrimony after a quarter of a millennia of the American Republic and 80 years of Philippine Sovereignty on the same date:

Two millennia separate the first levy of the Roman Republic’s citizen swordsmen and the first militia and later citizen musket men of the American and French Revolutions, yet many of the same institutions and ideals of both soldier and state were drawn from their classical predecessors. In this study we find that the citizen-swordsman himself became a foundational expression and upholder of his particular form of state, more disciplined than tribal war-bands and more mobile and flexible than the Hellenic phalanxes without the reliance on an elite noble cavalry wing…

Yet competing generals and a classical slave economy turned the Roman ideal upside down where even skilled gladiator swordsmen like Spartacus could not liberate their fellow brethren from a Rome now ruled by strongmen, enforced by decimation and proscription (random and politically-motivated execution) and soon to deify their autocrats! A millennia after Rome fell and the Church, the warhorse and the workhorse abolished the classical slavery in the ensuing age, gunpowder, shot and sail would change the world forever and the both modern republic and slavery would re-emerge…but not before sword and Cross would extend their patrimony to the ends of the world - and sword and steed their principle of modernity on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe!