Booklog
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.
Machiavelli: Discourses A
Machiavelli begins his work with an introduction, acknowledging the achievements of the ancient world and noting the reverence in which ancient art and law is held, but deploring the failure to learn the lessons that are taught by ancient history. Thus, we know from the beginning that he is not really writing history but political theory. In I.2, he shows that his objective is to find a stable constitutional arrangement, as the Spartans and Romans did. If a state has been improperly framed at the beginning, it probably cannot correct itself. He brings up the classical analysis, namely, three types of government, in good and bad forms: Monarchy/Tyranny, Aristocracy/Oligarchy, Democracy/Ochlocracy. None of them is really satisfactory, the bad types because they are bad and the good because they do not endure. The one form that does endure is the mixed system advocated by Aristotle, which incorporates the best features of all three good types.
Machiavelli I: An Abbreviated and Highly Inaccurate Brief History of Florene
It is a very grave mistake, when reading a political philosopher or theorist, not to take into consideration the world he lived in and his objective in writing. Plato, in writing the Republic, was expressing his complete disgust with the democracy that had brought Athens to ruin, and he was seeking to create a stable social order. In his political writings, Machiavelli was confronting two not unrelated problems in Italy. The first was the fact that Italy was periodically invaded by Germanic barbarians—German and French—who took over flourishing regions, raped and pillaged to their hearts’ content, imposed stiff taxes, and controlled the Church. One reason for this sad state of affairs was Italian disunity. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, dozens of kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, and counties arose, all of them jockeying for power, both with each other and with the two great institutions that claimed universal in the West: the Roman Church and the German Empire.
Machiavelli: Preliminary
We are going to begin a discussion of Machiavelli in a few days. We shall read some snippets of the Discourses and his Histories, and the whole of The Prince. I’ll announce which snippets in advance, though at this point I recommend reading the beginning.
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