An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one’s own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition. My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each [...]
To the extent that I am a human person, Homer’s Iliad speaks to me, but my particular circumstances are my own. As a result, a great question will help all people, including me, and so might be applicable to my peculiar place in space and time without being exhausted by it. In one week I’m teaching [...]
The classical curriculum remained the educational gold standard in nineteenth-century America. In fact, its influence grew, as women’s academies with a classical curriculum were founded all over the expanding nation… The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States by Carl J. Richard (Harvard University Press, 2009) With The [...]
By nixing Latin instruction from our schools, have we knocked the feet out from under generations of students, leaving them to struggle through the fog of schooling and literacy on their own…? A little over a year ago, it was reported that Australian schoolchildren were suddenly making dramatic gains in a number of subjects. The [...]
Might Dante not have been better served had he peopled the Hell of his Divine Comedy with fictional characters of his own invention, instead of actually naming them and therefore damning them?… If one were asked to name the greatest work of literature of all time, there would be only a handful of serious contenders. Both [...]
Inasmuch as mercy is a human virtue, and the liberal arts are human education, the virtue of mercy is precisely the sort of thing one will explore in a good liberal arts curriculum… I would like to begin by drawing attention to the title of our symposium, “Mercy and the Liberal Arts.” It’s an intuitive [...]
It is impossible to love both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells. Published originally during the Second World War, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad are two of the last century’s finest discussions [...]
At the end of each semester, I inevitably have one or two well-meaning students who are still unsure why they were asked to devote so much time and care to reading, annotating, and discussing archaic Greek literature. They enjoyed reading Homer. They liked our conversations in class, but, at the end of the course, lacking [...]
The Augustan Age refers to a time period broadly revolving around the restoration of order (if not necessarily liberty) at the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the empire—roughly 50BC to 120AD. Many scholars label it the “Silver Age of Roman Literature.” Every one of the authors listed below held numerous qualms [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Eric Voegelin as he explores the importance of studying the classics. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become [...]
A. 1. Glaucon’s introduction to philosophy will itself have a prelude. He will discover for himself the meaning of “opinion,” doxa. Opinion in its various meanings determines the musical key of the different parts of the dialogue by its absence or presence. The outer ring of logoi is explicitly spoken in a signature appropriate to the [...]
Think how peculiar this appellation is: “Pre-Socratics.” A whole slew of thinkers, poetical, aphoristic, prosaic—condemned to be known as the precursors of a man who wrote nothing! Forerunners are, it seems, ipso facto inferior to the rightly anointed. Take John the Baptist, the canonical precursor, who says of himself: “…he that cometh after me is [...]
As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine percent of my moral allegiance lies; otherwise, I would apologize to you—apologize for being about to suggest to you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes and plans [...]
At first glance, there would seem to be much work awaiting the teacher and scholar of language in the twenty-first century. The powers that be are obsessed with the industrial pollution of water, land, and air. The case seems to be clearer, or foggier, for pollution of language. Useful old words are no longer part [...]