Ancient Greece
There is a moment in the Iliad that tends to pass without much comment because Homer, in his characteristic way, presents it as a simple fact of the battlefield and moves on, and the moment is this: when Achilles is sulking in his tent, when the greatest warrior of the
US History
There is a peculiar species of political tragedy that does not fit comfortably within the categories American culture generally makes available for understanding defeat. We have the tragic hero brought down by a single fatal flaw, the Shakespearean model, and we have the good man destroyed by circumstance, the model
US History
Heracles, or Hercules, as I will refer to him through this essay, does not volunteer for the labors. This is the detail that tends to get lost when the myth is invoked casually, when someone reaches for the image of the hero and his twelve tasks as a shorthand for
US History
The aspect of the Prometheus myth that tends to receive the least attention in casual reference to it is also the aspect that matters most. We remember Prometheus as the rebel, the martyr, the figure chained to the rock while the eagle comes each day to devour his liver, and
American History
There is a scene near the end of the Iliad that I find myself returning to with some regularity, and that I think about more than almost any other passage in classical literature. Hector stands alone outside the walls of Troy. Achilles is approaching across the plain, and the Trojans
Lincoln
The Odyssey gives us Telemachus young, uncertain, fatherless in every practical sense that matters. Odysseus is absent, the household is beset by suitors who have made themselves at home in a space that is not theirs, and the boy who would be heir must navigate a world in which his
Paris
There is a certain kind of observer, present in every age, who moves through the world not as a detached spectator but as a deeply invested participant; someone who watches, considers, and, when the moment seems to call for it, ventures a thought on the state of things. The French