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Total Number of Articles: 6
First Article on this Page: February 7, 2025
Latest Article on this Page: February 6, 2026
Last spring, I wrote a column called “Dialogues of the Dead.” The premise was modest and demanding at once. Each piece took up an ancient author most readers had never seriously considered and asked what sustained attention to that work …
We begin not with a saint, but with a sinner.
We begin not with a saint but with a sinner.
That’s how Augustine would want it. The author of the “Confessions,” one of the most influential works in Christian and …
“Catullus sits in my soul.”
I wrote that line in my journal nearly three years ago, as a first-year student at Bowdoin College. I was seventeen, away from home for the first time and longing for a kind of connection …
The beginning of Aeschylus’ “Eumenides” is frustratingly parochial. The entire trilogy, really—“The Oresteia”—is infamous among classicists for its difficulty in the original Greek: rare words, archaic grammar, tangled syntax that makes translation a task of genuine suffering. Translator Emily Wilson, …
There are few works as unsettling as “The Republic.” Not because of its complexity or reputation but because it refuses to let us hide from the hardest questions: What is justice? Is it even possible? And what kind of life …
“To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our own blood.”
I don’t know who first wrote this. I could find out—likely by googling (though I’d use Safari, to be honest) that phrase to uncover which long-dead classicist, …
