Classics

Classics

Solon and Justice

By Walter Borden, M.D. The American Founders, including Madison, Jefferson, and Adams in creating our constitution studied the history of republics going back to Carthage, Greece and Rome. Adams in particular cited ancient Greece with long references to Solon, known as “the Law Giver”, one of the Seven Sages, and […]

Classics Literature

Aeschylus Speaks To Me

By Walter Borden, MD – Aeschylus speaks to me. Born in Eleusis, a village just north of Athens and the haunting grounds of the goddess Demeter, said to be the goddess of fertility and the harvest. To Aeschylus that was just a myth that masked her true identity– the goddess […]

Classics

No Pain, No Gain: On Reading Sappho and Beyond

By Malia Maxwell – To read the poet Sappho (Archaic Greek, 7th-6th c. BCE) is to embrace painful incompletion. Little of her work remains, and what we do have left carries with it the stain of absence. While no amount of longing for a “completed” text can fill in her […]

Classics

Hannibal’s Elephants

Image Courtesy of Jean-Pascal Jospin, Laura Dalaine Hannibal et les Alpes: une traversee in mythe, 2011 By Patrick Hunt – Anyone with some imagination about Hannibal often thinks first of his intrepid army march over the Alps with elephants. I’m often asked more about the elephants than the multicultural army […]

Classics

Furies to Juries: A Tale of Four Cities

W.-A. Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes, 1862 (public domain, courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art)   By Walter Borden, M.D. –  “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed out; for the first wrong, it doth offend the law, […]

Classics

Father of Tuscan Archaeology: Winckelmann in Florence

Bronze Chimera of Arezzo, ca 400 BCE, Cosimo I Medici Estate, Archaeological Museum, Florence (photo P. Hunt, 2014)  By Andrea Gáldy –  WINCKELMANN, FIRENZE E GLI ETRUSCHI IL PADRE DELL’ARCHEOLOGIA IN TOSCANA, Archaeological Museum, Florence, 26 May 2016 to 30 January 2017. Catalogue available in Italian and in German: Barbara Arbeid, […]

Classics

Hebrew Poetry and Word Play in Genesis 1:1-2

By Patrick Hunt –  While this is not in any way comprehensive, some of my favorite word plays from Hebrew literature show a deliberate use of language for suggesting multiple ambiguities, sometimes even steganographic – hiding things in plain sight – and often paronomasic – having connections in both sound […]