Herodotus honored mankind in the greatest way he knew how: by giving to them the place of his gods, the Muses, and by treating their memories like the memories of the gods. Herodotus begins his Histories with a two-sentence proemial (an introduction or preface) that reads: Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that [...]
In 1870, Heinrich Schliemann went to the Troad, the northwest corner of Asia Minor, and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam’s Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik. In the year 1822, a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade work of archeology into one [...]
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 [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Glenn Arbery as he contemplates the importance of poetry to a well-formed soul. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Last year when Dr. Kevin Roberts and I first met with the senior class in a course we were co-teaching, Dr. Roberts asked what [...]
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I [...]
The question of Homer’s existence is a little like the question of God’s. There, unquestionably, like the universe, are the Iliad and the Odyssey: But how did they come to be there? Were they composed by a single author, or were they gradually pieced together, as the classicist Richard Bentley said in 1713, from “a [...]
Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by “poet” I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I We not only read a novel, we enter into its created world. We [...]
A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths (An Academically Disreputable Inquiry) Questions: Are there canonical sources—gold-standards—for myths, and how would we recognize them? Should our re-visioning of sacred persons and mythical people stay true to the standard version? Should there be myth-dilations? […]
IV M.E. Bradford The principle underlying the Agrarian-New Critic’s position as literary critic, shared generally in the New Critical movement at large, may be simply put: Some poems are better than other poems. He judges them as things existing in themselves, made by that intellectual creature—man. The problem term, of course, is better, since it commits intellect, willy [...]
In the midst of the tumultuous trials of the modern age, and in a world as dangerous and unpredictable as the sea, T.S. Eliot offers in “Dry Salvages” a path of peace, and a road to redemption. As the Second World War raged around him, T.S. Eliot composed the third of his Four Quartets. Conscious [...]
G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. [...]
We know that Socrates was accused of introducing new gods and of corrupting the youth. But what was Socrates’ true position concerning the gods? “One Being, the only truly wise, does not and does agree to be called Zeus.” – Heraclitus This reading of the Euthyphro will grapple with the accusations of impiety leveled against [...]
The quest for elements is the best way we humans have of getting to the roots of things and making sense of our experience. And working at this together, in a community dedicated to learning, is one of the best services we can do, both for our own souls and for those of our fellow [...]
In the history of philosophy, what is the permanent achievement of the Pre-Socratics? Did they attain anything in thought that we can rightly credit to them? Or must they forever be seen as precursors to something greater? The very name used by scholars to classify them seems to condemn them forever to the status of [...]