Author: Rufus F.

Tired of hearing about the Tea Parties? WaPo introduces the “Coffee Party”, which aims to “promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will...

The Oresteia is a monument to the advent of law and order over primitive cycles of vengeance. The three-play cycle (the only complete Greek trilogy we have) was first performed at the Dionysia festival...

Is Canada getting a tea party? The Economist suggests so, pointing to the Wildrose Alliance, a group formed in Alberta because the Conservative Party isn’t sufficiently conservative for Albertans. (My neighbour explains all of...

Judging by the freshmen at my university (hereafter “Mall U”), I’d guess that high schools now assign the Odyssey more often than the Iliad. I suppose the Odyssey is more a yarn, with daring...

Now we come to Theogony, Hesiod’s account of the old gods and the coming of the Olympians. It’s rougher going than Works and Days. Some sections feature interminable lists as hard to keep straight...

Note: I’d like to stick my toe in the political waters a bit here, but do not intend to stray far from old books and art: my virtual bread and butter. However, E.D. Kain’s...

The Mesopotamians lived in a world that, at first glance, reminds one of the Ancient Greeks. There is the same interaction with a plethora of gods who guide men, but often remain indifferent to...

Continuing in the theme of the soldier’s dilemma, we have the Bhagavad-Gita, an excerpt from the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata. It is often read alone however; partly because the Mahabharata is so long...

Perhaps inappropriately, Mister Kain’s recent post about populist conservatism comes to mind because I’m reading Hesiod, who I’ve heard called a “conservative” more than a few times now. It’s a cringe-inducing term and terribly...

Long before they were recorded, the Homeric legends were the material of traveling oral bards who composed as they chanted, making use of certain stock formulas: the battle, the speech, the ritual, proper descriptions...

I’m always amazed to read essays on classical music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The writers, often with no more musical training than I have (i.e. none), also would have necessarily had to...

Western literature begins with The Iliad and, until recently, it was assumed that no educated person in the west could have skipped it. Set during a few days in the tenth year of the...

“Hateful, and fain of love more hateful still, Foul is the bird that rends another bird, And foul the men who hale unwilling maids, From sire unwilling, to the bridal bed. Never on earth,...

A professor in my History department, known colloquially as “the department anarchist”, and I spent an afternoon discussing my problems getting undergraduates to read Homer, Saint Augustine, and Dante in the same month. “Don’t...