Antiquitopia

During my insomnia last night, I picked up, as I usually do when I cannot sleep, some ancient philosophy--it works rather well as an antidote. Last night I picked up Plato's Gorgias , mainly because it is short. Socrates interrogates Gorgias and his colleague Polus about who they are and the nature of what they do--they are orators. In the process he begins to discuss the nature of justice (because he sees oratory as a "knack" or irrational component that opposes justice--justice being a great good because it heals the soul, since the soul is responsible for behavior. Its literary or even philosophical quality is not on par with Plato's other works in my humble opinion. The dialogue is often awkward and the arguments occasionally seem forced. But it has some redeeming qualities. One is an objection I have heard from my students concerning Socrates is that Socrates always gets to question in the elenchus process and never submits to similar questioning. But in ...

I have a bit of insomnia, so I decided to finish reading Cicero's De Natura Deorum ("On the Nature of the Gods"), and, having just taught Job not too long ago, the following passage caught my eye: Either God wishes to remove evils and cannot, or he can do so and is unwilling, or he has neither the will nor the power, or he has both the will and the power. If he has the will but not the power, he is a weakling, and this is not characteristic of God. If he has the power but not the will, he is grudging, and this is a traight equally foreign to God. If he has neither the will nor the power, he is both grudging and weak, and is therefore not divine. IF he has both the will and the power (and this is the sole circumstance appropriate to God), what is the source of evils, or why does God not dispel them? ( De Natura Deorum 3.65; Trans. P.G. Walsh) Unfortunately, this passage appears in a portion of the MSS that is riddled with lacunae. Just after this passage, there is su...

I am about to teach Aeschylus' trilogy, the Oresteia , which is actually the only tragic trilogy proper that has survived from antiquity. The basic story is that Agamemnon, on his way to Troy, sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to assuage the anger of Artemis, who, along with her brother Apollo, favored the Trojans. In response, when he returned home ten years later, his wife Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, murdered him. Yet, in response to that, Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon avenged his father's death by killing his mother. In turn, the Furies, who punished those who killed a blood relative, sought to punish Orestes. In the end, Orestes lands in Athens as he runs from the Furies. There, Athena, in a new form of justice, decides the case by a judicial court. So, we move from archaic "eye for an eye" justice to new judicial systems represented by the emergent democratic city-state. The Chorus, in the "Agememnon," the first o...