Investors are now betting that these two firms, together with Stripe and Adyen (which is Dutch), form a quartet that can take on America's stodgy financial establishment.
But Scipio was not one to listen to stodgy old men or superstitious priests. Scipio invaded Africa and, as predicted, Hannibal abandoned Italy to defend the Carthaginian homeland.
Such a party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience were — relatively — stodgy, and where the only emotion was a musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.