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“It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another. Therefore let men take heed of their company.” (V.i)

(Ironically spoken by the great comic wise-fool, Falstaff, just as he is about to lose access to Prince Hal forever…)

Alack, why am I sent for to a king,
Before I have shook off the regal thoughts
Where with I reigned? I hardly yet have learned
To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee.
Give sorrow leave a while to tutor me
To this submission. Yet I well remember
The favors of these men: were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me?
So Judas did to Christ: but he in twelve
Found truth in all but one;

“…for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humored thus,
Comes at last, and with a little pin

“Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like the grief itself, but is not so:
For Sorrow’s eye, glazéd with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives which, rightly gazed upon,
Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,
Distinguish form…” (II.2)

“O that I were a fool! / I am ambitious for a motley coat/ … / I must have Liberty / Withal, as large a charter as the wind, / To blow on whom I please, for so fools have. / … / Invest in me my motley, give me leave / To speak my mind, and I will through and through / Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world, / If they will patiently receive my medicine.” (II.7)

“But…I have long been surprised at my own wisdom—and doubtful of it too. That’s why I think it’s necessary to keep reinvestigating whatever I say, since self-deception is the worst thing of all. How could it not be terrible, indeed, when the deceiver never deserts you even for an instant but is always right there with you? Therefore I think we have to turn back frequently to what we’ve already said”

Plato parodies the purveyors of wisdom who charge money—still relevant today:

“To be sure, if I’d attended Prodicus’ 50 drachma lecture course, which he himself advertises as as an exhaustive treatment of the topic, there’d be nothing to prevent you from learning the precise truth about the correctness of names straightaway. But as I’ve heard only the 1 drachma course, I don’t know the truth about it

“And in that way everything mortal is preserved, not, like the divine, by always being the same in every way, but because what is departing and aging leaves behind something new, something such as it had been. By this device…what is mortal shares in immortality…”

“But when they came to writing, Theuth said: ‘O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.’ Thamus, however, replied: ‘O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them….

“If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.”

‘Persians’ by Aeschylus

Excellent, short play. The Persian court and people reckon with the news of their empire’s defeat by the Greeks. Aeschylus himself fought in the famous Persian Wars. While Greek victory is seen as that of freedom over servitude, there is no triumphalism here: the Persians, too, are victims. The people were deceived by a foolish king, Xerxes, and he himself was victim of hubris.

From Aeschylus’ ‘Persians’:

“All those who have known ills will understand / how when a wave of troubles breaks upon us / we tend to look on everything with fear, / but when the gods show favor, we believe / the same fair wind of luck will always blow.”

“Shouldn’t we then attempt to care for the city and its citizens with the aim of making the citizens themselves as good as possible? For without this…it does no good to provide any other service if the intentions of those who are likely to make a great deal or money or take a position of rule over people, or some other position of power, aren’t admirable and good.”

“Philosophy is no doubt a delightful thing, Socrates, as long as one is exposed to it in moderation at the appropriate time of life. But if one spends more time with it than he should, it’s the undoing of mankind. For even if one is naturally well favored but engages in philosophy beyond that appropriate time, he can’t help but turn out to be inexperienced in everything [he is] supposed to be experienced in.”

“Tell me, Socrates, are we to take you as being in earnest now, or joking? For if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?”

“Gorgias, I take it that you, like me, have experienced many discussions and that you’ve observed this sort of thing about them: it’s not easy for the participants to define jointly what they’re undertaking to discuss, and so, having learned from and taught each other, to conclude their session. Instead, if they’re disputing some point and one maintains that the other isn’t right or isn’t clear, they

The discussion that starts this dialogue on the role of technical experts vs. rhetoricians (in modern terms, politicians) is more relevant than ever. Gorgias convincingly argues that skilled orators (ie politicians) can defeat technical experts in any public vote — our own times prove him right.

The tension between these two is an underappreciated, and perhaps unresolvable, pain point in any democratic society…

In this reading, I’m noticing how often Dante’s Pilgrim shows ‘Curiositas,’ which, in the meaning derived from Augustine, is the sin of excessive interest in some vicious spectacle — e.g. attending gladiator matches, or, more contemporary, rubbernecking after a bloody accident. The Pilgrim is equally horrified and enticed by the spectacles of Hell, indicating his own flawed nature and flirtation with sin

“As little flowers, bent and closed / with chill of night, when the sun / lights them, stand all open on their stems, / such, in my failing strength, did I become. / And so much courage poured into my heart…”

It is midnight. I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last day. I’m sitting on my couch, wearing a black shirt stained white with baby spit-up, holding a sleeping newborn, and reading Dante. Could life get any better?

Athena exhorts the Athenians:

“Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people. / Worship the Mean, I urge you, / shore it up with reverence and never / banish terror from the gates, not outright. / Where is the righteous man who knows no fear? / The stronger your fear, your reverence for the Just, / the stronger your country’s wall and city’s safety, / stronger by far than all men else possess”

“But Justice shines in sooty hovels, / loves the decent life. / From proud halls crusted with gilt by filthy hands / she turns her eyes to find the pure in spirit — / spurning the wealth stamped counterfeit with praise, / she steers all things towards their destined end.

Aeschylus, who personally fought in multiple wars, describes the hollowness even of victory for the survivors:

“All through Greece for those who flocked to war / they are holding back the anguish now, / you can feel it rising now in every house; / I tell you there is much to tear the heart. / They knew the men they sent, / but now in place of men / ashes and urns come back / to every hearth.”

In this reading of Aeneid VI, I’m struck by how strongly Virgil’s conception of the afterlife and the nature of souls is influenced by Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic. Given Virgil’s clear influence on Christian writers from Augustine to Dante (and beyond), I think I’ve finally spotted the thread that ties Plato’s bizarre parable to the still influential ideas of heaven, hell, purgatory, etc.

Aeneas entering the Underworld:
“Pouring his way, all the seething crowd spills down to the stream’s banks: / Mothers and full grown men and the bodies of great hearted heroes / Finished with life, young boys, young girls who have never been married, / Youths in their prime set on funeral pyres while their parents are watching: / Countless as leaves during autumn’s first frost, falling in forests, /

I’m struck immediately by how Virgil portrays, for perhaps the first time in literature, a highly competent and virtuous Queen. I can’t think of any others in world literature until Spenser’s Elizabeth. Dido is an excellent ruler and the savior of refugees. It makes her betrayal by Aeneas—“founder” of Rome—all the more tragic, and is another way that Virgil subtly subverts Roman supremacist propaganda

“Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move, / earth bears none frailer than mankind. What man / believes in woe to come, so long as valor / and tough knees are supplied him by the gods? / But when the gods in bliss bring miseries on, / then willynilly, blindly, he ensures. / Our minds are as the days are, dark or bright, / blown over by the father of gods and men. / So I, too, in my time thought to be happy;

“Attend me quietly, be at your ease, / and drink your wine. These autumn nights are long, / ample for storytelling and for sleep. / … /

…we’ll drink on, you and I, / and ease our hearts of hardships we remember, / sharing old times. In later days a man / can find a charm in old adversity, / exile, and pain….”

“Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass / his own home and his parents? In far lands / he shall not, though he find a house of gold.”

Menelaus laments the toll of war on its survivors:

“How gladly I should live one third as rich / to have my friends back safe at home!—my friends / who died on Troy’s wide seaboard, far / from the grazing lands of Argos./ But as things are, nothing but grief is left me / for those companions. While I sit at home / sometimes hot tears come, and I revel in them, / or stop before the surfeit makes me shiver.”