Wuthering
Expectations

Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippias last nig...

I’ve been enjoying Plato’s dialogues recently.  I’d read some of them before, at university or during my last Greek phase 25 years ago, and ...

The great Roman playwright Terence wrote six plays between 166 and 160 BCE, twenty years after the death of Plautus.  The story is that he w...

Disturbances in the Field (1983) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  Rohan Maitzen recommended the novel to me because of its unusual use of the Pr...

I have been pursuing the sophists, the great antagonists of Socrates and Plato.  Minimized for centuries in the history of philosophy as, fo...

The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of Menander and the other Greek New Comedy writ...

It is the 16th year of Dolce Bellezza’s remarkable Japanese Literature Challenge – in the old days for some reason we “challenged” people t...

My rummage through the early Greek philosophers has been rewarding, but it is a strange exercise.  “Readers of this book will, I suspect, be...

The conceptual innovation of Thales that we identify as the birth of philosophy quickly spun off other conceptual innovations.  A real conce...

He [Thales of Miletus] held that the original substance of all things is water, and that the world is animate and full of deities.  They say...

We have the complete Plato, from multiple manuscript sources.  We have lost every published book (widely copied scroll) of Aristotle’s, but ...

Greek philosophy, readalong #2. This idea got more interesting the more I thought about it, but had more organizational problems, plus the...

Roman plays, a sampling, readalong #1. Fresh off the Greek plays, I want to revisit some of the surviving Roman plays to remind myself wha...

When I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) several years ago I was interested in it as a 19t...

I will deposit my notes on On Great Writing , which is either a 3rd century text by Longinus, one of the great scholars and rhetoricians of ...

The glory days of book blogs were full of “challenges.”   I hosted several: Scottish literature, Italian, Austrian, Scandinavian, Portuguese...

If only I had another idea as good as reading all the Greek plays in order.  But I do have ideas. 1. Roman plays.   Up to five Roman playw...