Wuthering
Expectations

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...

I am quoting the end of Alcestis by Euripides, his early whatever it is, not a tragedy, not a satyr play, not a comedy.  Admetos has won ba...

It’s our last plays, the last surviving Greek play, The Girl from Samos (315 BCE) by Menander.  How tastes, or circumstances, had changed i...

This week it’s Menander’s Dyskolos , or The Grouch , or The Misanthrope (316 BCE), which may or may not have inspired the title of Molière’...

We saw Sophocles and Euripides end their long careers with masterpieces, but we do not have that luck with Aristophanes.  Wealth (388 BCE) ...

Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics (late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the ...

The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes – or The Parliament of Women , or several other titles – was performed in 392 BCE, thirteen years after T...

Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles is one of the plays that got me excited about the entire project of reading or re-reading the complete play...