Reading the Signs of the Times Without Surrender
René Girard’s mimetic theory has described how mimesis leads to collective violence. His readings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy argue that tragedy reveals the origins of violent…
Spinoza and The Stoics on Suicide
Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics, and the Passions. Firmin DeBrabander. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Euthanasia and physician-assisted death is a topic much in…
Historical Consciousness and The Roman Road
Thomas Hardy’s mother died in 1904 at the age of ninety. One of the poems Hardy wrote, musing on her memory, is called “The Roman Road.” In…
Catullus on Sappho: The Divine Ecstasy of Love
The Roman poet Catullus translated a masterful love poem by the Greek poet Sappho, adapting it from her Greek (Sappho 31) into his Latin (Catullus 51). While…
Marcus Aurelius and The Dying Wisdom of the Gladiator
In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, the philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius makes a wonderful appearance. In this poetic portrayal of the truths of history, Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard…
Pizza Romana: The Mediterranean Diet and the Founding of Rome
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In…
Why the Roman Empire Was an Empire Like No Other
What made the Roman Empire an empire like no other was that it alone was the city that became an empire. Its distinctively republican civic form became…
The Sword of Damocles: No Friends for the Tyrant
The idea seems to be that even someone who has discipline, works hard, and is very active, will nonetheless still be unhappy if their own character is…
Birth of a Tyrant: The Dreams of the Mob
Plato gives an account in the ninth book of the Republic of how a tyrannical soul is formed. Socrates pauses and notes that, in order to proceed…
Plato’s Ring of Gyges: Power and The Divided Self
Given the fantastic premise of this myth, we are able to construct a thought experiment to test out the virtue of the two types of human beings:…
The Truth about Plato’s “Noble Lie”
What did Plato actually teach in the Republic about the so-called “noble lie?” For convenience, I shall refer to it by designating it as “The Plato Doctrine.”…
In Praise of the “Divine Madness”
When I first discovered Plato, I was delighted to learn that philosophy could be exciting, rather than boring. I learned that Plato wrote eloquently in praise of…
Losing Your Mind in Art
Plato’s Ion contains an unforgettable image describing artistic experience. In conversation with a rhapsode named Ion, Socrates likens the activity of poets to the operation of a…
The Legacy of the Pre-Socratics
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…
Technological Servitude and Marshall McLuhan’s Proposal for Liberation
Marshall McLuhan identified our time of postmodernity as the “ecological age” in which technological dominance has become planetary. This undeniable truth is a fact that may be…
