Category: Fleming
The First Stasimon and Second Episode
The chorus is, as we say in psychobabble slang, into denial and don’t want to talk about Ajax’s impending suicide. Instead, after complaints about life in the field outside Troy, their thoughts carry them back to their home on the island of Salamis.
Oobla Dee Oobla Da, Life Goes On Even Without Trump
It’s time to dry our eyes, take a deep breath, and bear our burdens cheerfully.
Ajax: The Parodos and First Episode
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...
Anterus and Proclus, Part II
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...
Anterus Smith Interviews the Philosopher Proclus
I knew this early on and watched, as every decade went by, people—not just Americans—growing duller and dumber, ruder and more indifferent to all the little customs and courtesies that had separated us from savages.
Sophocles’ Ajax I: Preliminary
I hardly ever read introductions to classic works of English or American fiction; however, the farther removed we are a literary tradition, the more we may feel the need of a little preliminary exposition. The Athenian poet Sophocles was born a few years after 500 B.C. and would have been about thirteen years old when Xerxes led the Persian army into Greece and burned the temples on the Athenian acropolis.
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Conclusion
It is through the rituals of common meals, common worship and common work that a family discovers its identity as a family. The pleasures and opportunities, no less than the pressures of modern existence threaten this identity.
Poem: An Exile’s Bicentennial
This was the first of a number of “sermons,” a play on Horace’s term (sermones) for his satires plus an implied rebuke to the poet’s tendency to preach.
Fiddling While Rome Burns, Part Three
The Household is not just a “castle” but a little commonwealth. When Cain was expelled from his father’s polity of hearth and home, he realized that exile from the community of kinfolks was a fate at least as bad as death. ”My punishment” he declared, “is greater than I can bear….I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” The family is primarily an expression of blood-ties and the affections they engender. In a broader sense, however, the household is a model for...
