classics digests, reflections and reviews
The Politician is a Slave The politician must needs be a man of many sides and many forms. He must be a different man in peace from what he is in war. He resists the few with vigorous action, but uses persuasion in his dealings with the many. When the would-be popular orator mounts the platform, like a slave in the market, he becomes a bond-servant instead of a free […]
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They say that when he was still a young man he withdrew into a cave and studied there, shaving half of his head to keep himself from going out; also that he slept on a narrow bed in order to get up quickly, and that since he could not pronounce the sound of R he learned to do so by hard work, and since in declaiming for practice he made […]
Read more[Warning: The following post contains coarse language, nudity and explicit sexuality. Reader’s discretion is strongly advised.] Eppia, a Senator’s Wife Oblivious of her home and husband and sister, she disregarded her fatherland and shamelessly deserted her wailing children and, what’s more amazing, Paris and the Games. But although as a little girl she had slept in great opulence on her family down in cradles with flounces, she scorned the sea. […]
Read moreThe Dissolute He is paralysed with vice, and thick fat has gown over his liver. He has no sense of guilt or of what he’s lost. He’s sunk so deep that he makes no more bubbles on the surface. You’re still snoring and your lolling head with its joint unhinged is yawning yesterday’s yawn, with your jaws completely unstitched. Is there something you’re heading for, a target for your bow? […]
Read more“As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” The Origin and History of Oratory In “Brutus“, Cicero traces the origin and history of oratory in ancient Greece and Rome, and provides a concise and astute critique of various classes of individual orators, ranking their achievements in the five components of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, diction/expression, action/delivery and memory). Demosthenes is considered the greatest among the […]
Read more[Volume XV of Loeb Classical Library’s 28-volume series] Peace, Slavery and War The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself wholesome, but between peace and servitude the difference is great. Peace is tranquil liberty, servitude the last of all evils, one to be repelled, not only by war but even by death. Although all decent men desire peace, especially peace between fellow countrymen, I have desired more than […]
Read more[Original Latin Title: De Finibus Bonorum Et Malorum; Volume XVII of Loeb Classical Library’s 28-volume series] An Epicurean’s Criticism of Education “[Epicurus] refused to consider any education worth the name that did not help to school us in happiness. Was he to spend his time in perusing poets, who give us nothing solid and useful, but merely childish amusement? Was he to occupy himself like Plato with music and geometry, […]
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