In the first volume of Jenson and Braaten’s Christian Dogmatics 2 Vol Set , Jenson highlights five features of Hellenistic religion, which he says also characterizes Greek philosophy. Of course, for Jenson, the central issue is time. First, the crucial question is, “Can it be that . . . . Continue Reading »
We typically think of Greeks as Apollonian and rational. We don’t think of Greeks as people concerned with pollution and purity. Like all ancient peoples, though, they were, as Robert Parker details in his wonderful Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion . . . . Continue Reading »
Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to . . . . Continue Reading »
The idea of Odysseus as a hero of mind or thought has an ancient pedigree. The Pythagoreans interpreted Odysseus as a thinking man who passed through the underworld on a path of denial of the flesh and escape from the eternal round of reincarnation. Proclus wrote, “Many are the wanderings and . . . . Continue Reading »
Jane Harrison begins her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Mythos Books) with a quotation from Ruskin regarding the “genius of the Greeks”: “there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm . . . . Continue Reading »
David Gress’s excellent From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents shows that classics programs, the discipline of classics, great books programs, are founded on a highly questionable “grand narrative” of Western civilization. According to this narrative, Western . . . . Continue Reading »
David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria , the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something. . . . . Continue Reading »
David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann. It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems. There is no reason to doubt that the scepter of . . . . Continue Reading »
Aristotle defined magnanimity or “great-mindedness” as a proper estimate of one’s merits: “The Great-minded man is then, as far as greatness is concerned, at the summit, but in respect of propriety he is in the mean, because he estimates himself at his real value (the other . . . . Continue Reading »
Judith Evans Grubbs notes that the Antonine Roman emperors pursued a pro-family agenda, employing pro-family numismatic symbols for that purpose: In addition to the use of the goddess Pudicitia, “also celebrated on Antonine coins is the concordia (sense of harmony, agreement) shared by the . . . . Continue Reading »
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