Booklog
Vergil’s Aeneid: Historical Introduction
Publius Vergilius Maro was born near Mantua (modern Mantova), a town in the Po Valley in 70 B.C. These were troubled times, in the death-throes of the old republic. Carthage had been defeated in the three Punic Wars and the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors had been either conquered or reduced to impotence, but, as the empire grew, other enemies rose up: Barbarian tribes–Teutons and Cimbri–invaded Italy, and Mithradates of Pontus (a Greco-Iranian kingdom) had championed the rights of the subjugated Greeks and challenged Roman supremacy in the East.
Vergil’s Aeneid: Preliminaries
This booklog is the formal inauguration of the all-new and much-promised Rockford Institute website found again at rockfordinstitute.org. Please check out the old features—earlier discussions of the classical tradition and teaching methods—as well as the booklist and additional columns and resources that will be added on a regular basis. Between now and Christmas, I am going to conduct a very leisurely discussion of one of the greatest works of literature, Vergil’s Aeneid. I may well undertake other, much briefer booklogs, but this will be a primary occupation as part of my preparation for The Rockford Institute Winter School in Rome. We have about seven months and thus should be able to go at a rate of one book every two weeks. If you are reading carefully in English, this is a matter of an hour or so. If you are reading the Latin, 30 minutes a day should allow you to keep up. (Students and young teachers should begin thinking about applying for scholarships, if they wish to attend the Winter School.)
Trollope the Casuist
When the noble art of casuistry was driven from the field by an army of moral pygmies led by Descartes, Locke, and Kant, a gaping hole opened up. In an ethical system devoted exclusively to abstract rights or abstract duties, how could the real problems of life be discussed? The answer (and I owe this insight to the work of Edmund Leites) came in the form of fiction, in the counterpoint between the self-righteous Bliffel and the good-hearted sinner Tom Jones, in the beautiful moral essays that lie just beneath the surface of Jane Austen, and, above all, in the novels of Anthony Trollope.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
One of the great interests of Anglo-Saxon poems is the heroic code of the warriors. They fight for their own glory, of course, but also to protect and avenge their lord, to preserve their religion, and defend the liberties of their people. Unlike the Vikings, they are neither savages nor merely predators.
BookLog Query
Daria’s questions (on Greek Diary II) have given me a twinge of guilt over neglecting my teaching duties. I am ready to resume the BookLog and willing to entertain suggestions. I am also open to suggestions on controversies in the news.
Herodotus Book V
Herodotus, in Book V, begins to weave together the main strands of his narrative: the expansion of the Persian Empire, the curious ways of barbarian peoples, and the petty and feuding Greek states that will, mirabile dictu, defeat the greatest empire the world had known.
Herodotus II: East is East and West Is Best
Finally, having dispatched the Neopagans and the barbarian hordes and after orchestrating our glorious victory in Afghanistan, I am ready to return to Herodotus. His theme, as I observed in the first installment, is the conflict between Europe and Asia or, more properly, Greeks and barbarians. In a way, his work can be treated as a kind of essay in definition, that is, he is defining Greekness or Hellenism partly by describing Greek behavior and partly by the contrast, often merely suggested, with barbarians.
Herodotus II
The basic themes of the Histories emerge in the First Book. The opening sentence and paragraphs give us a fairly clear idea of the author’s intentions.
“This is the exposition / setting-forth of the history of Herodotus of Halicarnassus…”
Booklog: Herodotus—Introduction
The Persian Wars are the subject of two literary masterpieces: Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Persians. Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, perhaps it would be useful to take a brief look at a few of the books of Herodotus that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies. We’ll start with Book I.
Machiavelli: Discourses B
As any schoolboy used to know, the Greeks not only invented or brought to perfection most of the great arts of civilization—epic, tragedy, and comedy; classical architecture, sculpture, painting—but left behind monuments that have rarely been equalled and never surpassed. The history of philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead once famously remarked, is a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. This observation is, if anything, even more accurate in the case of political philosophy and theory. Even the bad theories of Epicurus (materialism, atheism, state of nature, social contract) are more brilliantly conceived than those of his modern imitators, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx. Marx, by the way, was well aware of his debt, since he wrote a thesis on Epicurus.
