In my last essay I explored the origins of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. Hopefully I made a compelling case that the conflict was more than just the confiscation of a prize of war, but at the root of the situation were two competing visions about what it meant to be “great”. Agamemnon’s troops... Continue Reading →

I'm already 3 essays in and I haven't even cracked open the book yet. This is a bad sign. I promise we'll get moving, we might even make it all the way through Book 1 of 24 today. What makes a person great? Why should one person follow another? If someone has put their life... Continue Reading →

How do you keep a thousand ships worth of men on a foreign beach for a decade? How do you convince fathers, sons, and brothers to abandon their families, farms, duties, and other personal ambitions to risk their lives and lay siege to a city whose walls were reportedly built by Poseidon himself and would... Continue Reading →

As I mentioned in a prior essay I’ll do my best to neither assume knowledge of, nor import too much information from extra-textual stories about the Trojan war when discussing the primary topics of interest in this series. I think it worth a moment to make a brief catalog of things that are either explicitly... Continue Reading →

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I made it into my 30s before I learned the truth about the Iliad. It's not the story of the Trojan war. Perhaps I wasn’t listening in the 9th grade when we read selections from the Odyssey. My recollection is that we were told that The Odyssey took place... Continue Reading →

Have you ever given much thought to the concept of hope? I haven’t. Not really. What is it exactly? Is it substantially different from wishful thinking or a simple expression of desire? It is often enumerated as a virtue, is it genuinely virtuous to develop? If so, why and how? Some folks are capable of... Continue Reading →

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for many years. I love it for many reasons. I like how we celebrate our time of plenty in transition from the soft light of autumn harvest to the colder, darker, depths of winter. It's a great party feasting with friends and family. It is one of the few... Continue Reading →

The Maelstrom Imagine, if you will, you find yourself in Athens in 429 BCE. Your city is emerging from a siege imposed by the Spartans. The confinement of the siege, as is often the case, resulted in a plague that ravaged the population. You almost certainly either had the disease yourself and had a brush... Continue Reading →

I strongly suspect almost nobody on the planet managed to get through my ramblings on The Book of Job. That’s fine. I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt my feelings. I’m not even disappointed. It was really long, and full of heresy and digressions, and was primarily intended for an audience of one, and I enjoyed it.... Continue Reading →