ancient greece

History

Odyssey, Blog 3, Odysseus Returns Home to Ithaca

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We get a rare glimpse into the lives of the slaves, the lives spent serving their masters, when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, approaches the hovel of his swineherd Eumaeus, who chases away the dogs who snap at the stranger, offering hospitality to even an old beggar. “Old man, my dogs had nearly torn you to pieces here, all of a sudden, and so you would have brought reproach upon me. Ah well! The gods have given me other griefs and sorrows; for over my matchless master I sit and sign and groan, and tend fat hogs for other men to eat; while my master, hungry, wanders among lands and men who speak alien tongues, if he still lives and feels the sunshine. But follow me, old man, into the lodge, so that when you have eaten and drunk your fill, you may tell me where you come from and what troubles you have borne.” The good swineherd is more concerned about the beggar’s troubles than who he is. […]

History

Odyssey, Blog 2, Odysseus Sings His Adventures

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While the Cyclops was fast asleep from the wine, Odysseus and his men drove a large wooden stake into his one eye, blinding him. The Cyclops jumped up and tried feeling about for the men in vain. The next morning, they each escaped by hanging onto the bottom of the large sheep and rams as Cyclops let them out to pasture. After escaping the men loaded the sheep onto their ships, and Cyclops roared at them and threw boulders into the sea near their ships. […]

History

Odyssey, Blog 1, Waiting Those Very Long Years For Odysseus

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Just as the Iliad revolved around the need to show hospitality and respect to the enemy who had courage to enter your camp, often to ransom his relatives, or to fetch their bodies for a proper burial, so the Odyssey revolves around the need to show hospitality to strangers. Travel in the ancient world was arduous and hazardous, and if you did not show hospitality to stranger, or what the Greeks called xenia, the stranger could die. […]

Epictetus and Rufus

Stoic Philosopher Musonius Rufus on Exile

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Rufus asks, like a good stoic, Why should the exile lament of his condition, why should he complain, how is he oppressed? Has he been exiled from the warmth of sun, has he been exiled from being refreshed by the rain, has he been excluded from the society of men? Rufus adds that in exile we may associate with our friends, our true friends, those friends “who would never betray or abandon us,” but those who shun us are not true friends, we are better off without those who are not truly friends. The most important question Rufus asks is, “How can exile be an obstacle to the . . . acquisition of virtue, when no one was ever hindered from the knowledge and practice of what is needful because of exile?” Rufus dismisses those who insist that exiles are the worse off when they also lose their freedom of speech. Nonsense, Rufus says, for you never truly lose your freedom of speech, for nobody can ever take away your freedom of thought, and if you do not feel free to speak out against injustice or impiety, you are not limited by lack of freedom, you are reined back by FEAR. To the truly courageous who insist on speaking out, the truly courageous who fear neither pain nor punishment nor death, how can they lose their freedom? They are truly free.

We must truly be thankful of all our fortunes and misfortunes, for neither keeps us from seeking virtue, and both can aid us in our journey towards greater virtue, towards salvation, towards the working out of our salvation, for what else does working out our salvation mean, if it does not mean that we work out our salvation through both our blessings and our sufferings? […]

History

The Iliad Blog 7, the Deaths of Patroclus and Hector

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The embassy to Achilles ends with them leaving not a warrior
but simply a bard strumming his lyre alone on the shores of the sea.
The battle lines sway back and forth, Odysseus and Ajax spy a Trojan spy,
and cut him down, then the Trojans in his advance camp.
The battle wages, many warriors fall, many warriors are wounded and healed,
as Professor Vandiver notes, they either or suffer minor injuries,
the heroes of the Iliad never suffer humiliating injuries. The Trojans fight their way to very walls of the Greek camps,
which was really a fortified fortress with palisades of sturdy timbers,
surrounded by a deep ditch dug to furnish earth for protection. […]

Epictetus and Rufus

Musonius Rufus on Concupiscence and Controlling the Appetites

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Many who denigrate St Augustine for his overly strict attitudes on intimacy and concupiscence do not realize that he was repeating what Stoic philosophers taught. Rufus is our best example, he criticizes “men who live luxuriously and desire a variety of sexual experiences, legitimate and illegitimate, with both women and men.” Then Rufus gives us advice that is very similar to the teachings of St Augustine: “men who are neither licentious nor wicked must consider only those intimate acts between husband and wife for the creation of children to be right and lawful, but intimate acts that chase after mere pleasure, even in marriage, to be wrong and unlawful.” What if nobody is hurt by these acts of pleasure? Rufus maintains “everyone who acts wrongly and unjustly, even if doesn’t hurt those near to him, immediately shows himself to be entirely base and dishonorable.” […]

History

The Iliad Blog 5, the Tide of Battle Turns Against the Greeks

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Hector is pissed. The duel between Romeo and Agamemnon was supposed to settle and finish this endless war that is just dragging on grinding thousands of soldiers in its maw. He asks himself, Where art thou, Romeo? Paris has disappeared from the battlefield. Aphrodite has magically carried his opponent Paris from the battlefield to the bed of Helen just as he was about to lose the duel and end this dreadful war. […]

Epictetus and Rufus

Musonius Rufus, Stoic Philosopher, Forgiveness and Obedience

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When someone wrongs us, should we file suit, or should we forgive and forbear? Rufus explores this topic in his lecture on whether a philosopher should file a suit when assaulted. He tells us that “those who do not know what is really good and what is really shameful, and who are overly concerned with their own fame, these people think that they are being injured if someone glares at them, laughs at them, hits them, or mocks them. But a man who is thoughtful and sensible, as a philosopher should be, is disturbed by none of these things.” […]