Category: Fleming

Athena’s parting words are to remind Odysseus and the audience that “The Gods love the sophrones and hate the kakoi.  These are two key words for Greek morality and are rather more opposed than the English words “prudent” and “bad.”  The man who is sophron, is he whose thinking abilities (the phrenes) are sound, who can judge the future by the past, who keeps his strong feelings under control.  Sophrosyne, the great Aristotelian virtue, is a distillation of the Greek folk wisdom exemplified in the Delphic proverbs, “Nothing in excess,” “Measure is best,” and “know thyself,” which is to say, “always...

This line of thinking was so tediously familiar to me that I had given up following the news through any medium, and, as I fell into walking down these mental pathways,  my own musings began to bore me so much I could not control my yawning.  I had obviously awakened too early.  I closed my eyes, and, as I drifted off, I saw myself or someone who looked an awful lot like Anterus Smith, dressed in the simple white tunic philosophers in the schools affected.  He was speaking in Greek with an older and more distinguished man, who was having...