2025: Q1
2024: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2023: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2022: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2021: Q3 • Q4
2020: Complete Reading List • Summer Book Recommendations
2019: Holiday Book Recommendations
2018: Holiday Book Recommendations

Full Listing of All Book Reviews Published Since 2009

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Author: Alice Schroeder
Year of Publication: 2008
Length: 935 pages

In January 1999, Alice Schroeder wrote an extensive report on Berkshire Hathaway entitled The Ultimate Conglomerate Discount. As an analyst at PaineWebber, Ms. Schroder impressed Warren Buffett with her knowledge of the insurance industry as well as her talent for writing. Her 1999 report was groundbreaking in terms of its explanation of the power of Berkshire’s float. A few years later, Mr. Buffett encouraged Ms. Schroeder to write his biography by providing generous access to his personal and professional papers as well as encouraging his friends, family, and business associates to cooperate with the project. The Snowball was published in the fall of 2008, right in the midst of the worst phase of the financial crisis.

I read The Snowball soon after it was published but I was no doubt distracted by the financial crisis and the demands of the job I had at the time. When Mr. Buffett announced his retirement as CEO of Berkshire at the annual meeting in May, I decided that it would be a good time to revisit his biography. I have often found that revisiting books that I read earlier in my life yield new insights. When I first read The Snowball, I was amusingly focused on how I might replicate Mr. Buffett’s investment success. The book certainly went into details about his investment approach, but this is not an investing book. As a biographer, Ms. Schroder appropriately sought to write a book covering Mr. Buffett’s entire life. While I found the personal details interesting, I did not find much that I didn’t already know about Mr. Buffett’s investment approach.

Having long since given up any delusions about replicating Mr. Buffett’s investment record, this time around I was more interested in learning who he was as a younger man and how he changed as he progressed through middle age. Ms. Schroeder’s work has been the subject of some criticism regarding the details of Mr. Buffett’s life that she uncovered in the course of extensive interviews. However, it is very interesting to know the personal challenges facing an individual along with the business activities they were engaged with at the same time. For example, Mr. Buffett’s ability to deal with challenges such as the Buffalo News and the complexities of merging Diversified Retailing and Blue Chip into Berkshire are even more impressive when one understands the turmoil in his personal life during that period.

I suspect that neither the author nor the subject of the book expected that the story was nowhere near its conclusion in 2008. It is obvious that another biography of Warren Buffett remains to be written to cover the massive growth of Berkshire Hathaway since 2008. Alice Schroeder accomplished a great deal by interviewing so many of Mr. Buffett’s contemporaries who are sadly no longer alive today. No future biographer will have that kind of access, but the early years are now well documented.

I suggest taking the time to read the endnotes since they provide additional context that is very interesting, at least to Berkshire Hathaway “cult members” and nerds who never get tired of getting into the weeds.

The Best of Jonathan Clements

Author: Jonathan Clements
Editors: Christine Benz, William Bernstein, Allan Roth, and Jason Zweig
Year of Publication: 2025
Length: 236 pages

After writing about investing for decades at the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Clements founded Humble Dollar, a blog about personal finance. I do not know Jonathan, but when you read someone’s work for decades, you feel like you almost know them. So I was shocked and saddened to read of Jonathan’s stage four cancer diagnosis when he wrote about it a year ago. It is particularly terrible to read about cancer impacting someone who is only in his early sixties and has written about his own meticulous retirement planning.

Over the past year, I have continued to follow Jonathan’s articles on Humble Dollar and when I read about the publication of a book that compiled his best articles, I immediately ordered it. The book contains a selection of his articles written over the past three decades, all of which retain relevance today. The articles appear to be published as initially written, although I noticed that the editors made some useful changes such as updating details like the estate tax exemption to make it more useful for current readers.

All of the proceeds from the book are going to a new charitable initiative called The Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative which is run by The John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy.

The Haywire Heart

Authors: Christopher J. Case, John Mandrola, and Lennar Zinn
Year of Publication: 2017
Length: 294 pages

The obesity epidemic makes it clear that the vast majority of Americans are getting far too little exercise, and nearly everyone could benefit from increasing their commitment to being active. However, for a small subset of endurance athletes, there is a danger of exerting the heart to the point where dangerous arrhythmias and other exercise-driven heart adaptations can develop over long periods of time and result in consequences that range from merely annoying to life-threatening.

Although I was never overweight, until my mid-thirties my level of exercise consisted of getting out for a jog a few times a week, if I was lucky. My stress level was through the roof and my diet was abysmal. Although retiring at a very early age is a mixed bag, there is no doubt that I had far more time to focus on my health after I quit my job in 2009. I began to train for a marathon, a long-held goal, and promptly injured myself. However, I eventually got into long distance running and completed eight marathons, posting finishing times that were respectable although frustratingly short of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

I read this book because I was concerned that my current habit of running ~200 miles per month could be too much, especially in light of other heart-related risk factors for someone in his early-fifties. My conclusion is that my level of training is well short of the individuals profiled in the book, especially since I no longer run marathons. However, I might still cut back a little because I am exercising far in excess of what’s needed for heart health. I would suggest this book for anyone who does a lot of cardiovascular exercise, especially long distance cyclists, swimmers, or triathletes. Many of the victims of arrhythmias were in their fifties which seems to be the point at which decades of slow changes can become symptomatic.

Plato’s Republic

Author: Plato
Translator: Desmond Lee (Penguin Classics)
Year of Publication: ~375 BC
Length: 416 pages

My first attempt to read Plato’s Republic was in early 2024 and I wrote an article about the first two books of this lengthy and complicated work. I decided that my attempt was premature and thought that a better understanding of Ancient Greek culture would allow me to better appreciate Plato’s arguments. This led me to read the Greek tragedies and comedies in 2024 and early 2025.

In April, I started reading The Republic at the beginning and, with the excellent introductions and notes provided by Desmond Lee in the Penguin Classics edition, I was able to follow the entire dialog to its conclusion. To say that I was shocked by Plato’s vision of an optimal society is an understatement. Many people seem to believe that Plato’s Republic was some kind of precursor to modern-day republics such as the United States. This is certainly not the case. Plato’s ultimate vision of the Philosopher-King ruler has little in common with our modern notions of what a republican form of government means.

That is not to say that Plato has nothing useful to tell us. Through the mouth of Socrates, Plato develops many complex philosophical ideas regarding education, justice, virtue, honor, what it means to live a good life, and the afterlife. However, it is hard to get past some of his extreme communal ideas, such as essentially banning the family unit, at least among the elite guardian class. The form of eugenics involved in the “breeding” of the guardian class would no doubt horrify almost everyone who reads it today.

I have more than twenty-five pages of notes and reflections on The Republic and will most likely return to it again at some point in the future. However, after spending well over a month on it, reading most sections multiple times, I set it aside for now and certainly won’t hazard making more comments in public at this point. My recommendation is to start with other works of Plato, such as the collection in the Penguin Classics The Last Days of Socrates which I wrote about in last quarter’s summary of my reading.

The Fall of the Roman Republic

Americans of all political persuasions have been concerned about the potential fall of our republic in recent years, and I share this concern. It has become common to compare the United States of the early twenty-first century to the final decades of the Roman Republic, but I sometimes wonder if people making these comparisons understand the degree of violence and brutality of the Roman Republic’s final years. Nothing that has taken place since our Civil War approaches what took place in the finals decades in Rome.

I would recommend the following books for those interested in the long process that eventually led to the collapse of the Roman Republic. I returned to both of these books in the second quarter for a second time:

• The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan. I wrote up some thoughts about this book when I first read it in the third quarter of 2022. It covers the period from 144 BC to 78 BC, seeking to set the fall of the Republic as a story that goes back more than a century before the final fall.

• Rubicon by Tom Holland. This book focuses most of its attention on the fall of the Republic, centering the story on Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon river in 49 BC. However, it also contains a summary of earlier events, including touching on the populist movement of the Gracchi brothers where Mike Duncan begins his narrative.

I also read some of the brief biographical sketches of the main characters by Plutarch and found the profiles of the Gracchi brothers most interesting. Plutarch lived from 46 to 120 AD and collected fascinating information about a wide range of individuals, drawing on some source material that has since been lost. All contemporary accounts of the Roman Republic draw heavily on Plutarch and other ancient sources.

How to Make Friends and Influence People

Author: Dale Carnegie
Year of Publication: 1936
Length: 275 pages

As I read through this classic, I kept asking myself why I failed to read it three decades ago when it would have made a major difference in my life. Dale Carnegie’s common sense approach for dealing with people is just as valid in 2025 as it was in the 1930s when the book was first published. One could say that it is all simple common sense, but it is also clear that very few people employ the strategies he advocates.

While the book is most often categorized as “self-help” or “career development” it is also a work of basic human psychology and I was frequently reminded of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. As is the case with Cialdini’s techniques, one could attempt to use Carnegie’s approach to disingenuously manipulate people, but Carnegie did not think such an approach would work. In his view, sincerity is something that can be easily detected by most people. He stressed that he was advocating adopting an entirely new way of life, not simply a listing of “tricks” to get what you want.

Warren Buffett took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course in the early 1950s which changed his life. I am sure that he also read this book very early in his life. As I read the book, it was obvious that Mr. Buffett has adopted many of the techniques in the book, especially when dealing with sellers of businesses and managers of Berkshire’s operating companies.

The King James Bible

Year of Publication: 1611
Pages: 1,484

I decided to read the King James Bible after listening to a Books of Titans podcast by Erik Rostad. It occurred to me that making the effort to understand this translation of the Bible could help me understand the form of language that Shakespeare used in his plays. Although I did not plan to read Shakespeare anytime soon, I might change my mind after reading the King James Bible. I found the translation not only very readable but far more elegant than other translations I have read. There is something about the language, which was elevated even at the time it was written, that makes the experience memorable.

The version I read, which I linked to above, is not a “study bible” but it does have extensive cross-references and provides useful notes in cases where the archaic language could lead to misunderstanding. Since I have read many translations of the Bible over the past fifteen years, I am already very familiar with the scriptures and could have probably figured out the obscure wording myself, but having the notes within this book helped ease the process significantly. Reading any translation of the Bible in three months is a challenge, but it worked out to about sixteen pages per day, on average, and it was a pleasure to read.

I would not suggest the King James Bible to someone who has never read the Bible before. A more modern translation such as the ESV or RSV is easier to comprehend. But if you have read these modern translations and plan to read the Bible again, the King James Bible is worth considering.

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

Author: Adam Nicolson
Year of Publication: 2005
Length: 271 pages

I decided to read this book after listening to another Books of Titan’s podcast. Erik Rostad recommended this book for those interested in how the King James Bible was created. This book does get into the “weeds” of politics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as well as controversies within Protestantism at the time. King James commissioned a group to translate the Bible, drawing on earlier English translations that were already popular at the time. Although the King James Bible was not initially as popular as earlier translations, especially the Geneva Bible which was favored by the Puritans, the King James translation survived the test of time. It remains one of the most widely read English translations over four centuries after initial publication.

Copyright, Disclosures, and Privacy Information

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC. The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

2024: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2023: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2022: Q1 • Q2 • Q3 • Q4
2021: Q3 • Q4
2020: Complete Reading List • Summer Book Recommendations
2019: Holiday Book Recommendations
2018: Holiday Book Recommendations

Full Listing of All Book Reviews Published Since 2009

The Lessons of History

Authors: Will and Ariel Durant
Year of Publication: 1968
Length: 102 pages

Will and Ariel Durant spent nearly a half century working on The Story of Civilization, an eleven-part series published between 1935 and 1975. The series was intended to make history accessible to everyone rather than just to academics. Although the books were very successful when initially published, they have been out of print for many years. My only prior exposure to the Durants was a few years ago when I read Fallen Leaves, a compilation of essays written by Will Durant and published long after his death in 1981.

The Durants wrote this short book after a lifetime of historical inquiry to serve as a sort of summary or distillation of what they learned. Of particular interest was whether the lessons from history can be useful when it comes to predicting future events. To the extent that human nature changes slowly over time, our behavior can be predicted to some extent, but as technology advances far more quickly than adaptations to human nature, predictions can only be taken so far.

The book is divided into chapters that could be read as stand-alone essays. The chapter on war is very interesting. The authors note that war has been nearly constant in human history. Of the 3,421 years of recorded history up to the time of publication in 1968, only 268 years saw no war. The decades since the book was published have seen constant war, yet somehow the world has avoided nuclear Armageddon so far. There is no evidence to suggest that our luck will hold out indefinitely without constant vigilance.

American Journey

Author: Wes Davis
Year of Publication: 2023
Length: 308 pages

The personal mobility made possible by the automobile transformed American life during the first quarter of the twentieth century. This book tells the story of the automobile adventures shared by Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs during the 1910s, a time when road travel was primitive and far more risky than it is today. Trains still reigned supreme for long distance travel.

Almost everyone familiar with business history knows about the careers of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. John Burroughs is a more obscure name for many twenty-first century readers. A naturalist and author, Burroughs knew luminaries such as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir. Born in 1837, Burroughs was very much a man of the nineteenth century and he was highly skeptical of the automobile in his writing. This distressed Henry Ford who was a longtime admirer of Burroughs, so Ford decided to send the naturalist a Model T as a present. After initial skepticism, Burroughs came to appreciate the mobility offered by the Model T given that age made it hard to get around on foot.

The book is not a history of Ford Motor Company or a replacement for reading Henry Ford’s autobiography which I reviewed two years ago and recommend. But there is quite a bit of interesting business history mixed in with the story of the journeys the men took. However, the personal aspect of the relationship between the men is the best part of the book. Although they had different backgrounds and political views, there was mutual respect and tolerance for dissent that often doesn’t exist in our time.

Much of the controversy of the mid-1910s was related to America’s entry into the First World War. Edison and Burroughs were in favor of U.S. involvement while Ford was not. However, once war broke out, Ford was instrumental in wartime production. Unfortunately, this period also saw the emergence of Henry Ford’s notorious antisemitism, arguably the biggest stain on an otherwise remarkable life.

Xenophon

Xenophon was a man of many talents who lived from 430 BC to 355 BC. As a young man, Xenophon participated in an audacious expedition of mercenaries hired to help Cyrus overthrow his brother and claim the throne of Persia. During a long expedition through lands currently known as Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, the ten thousand Greek mercenaries fought bravely but Cyrus was killed in battle. The duplicity of the Persians allied to the Greek force soon became apparent and the Greeks found themselves stranded in the desert over a thousand miles from the Greek-speaking world. They could not return the way they came because they had depleted the land of supplies as they marched forward, so they had to take the long way back, through modern-day Kurdistan and Armenia where they faced vicious opposition. Xenophon took on a leadership role as one of the generals and published a book known as Anabasis as his memoir.

In addition to his military background, Xenophon was also a philosopher heavily influenced by Socrates, who he knew as a young man prior to the Persian expedition. Socrates left no written record of his work and Plato is most known for preserving Socrates’ philosophy in writing. However, Xenophon also recorded much interesting information about Socrates and, in the process, expressed his own thoughts as well.

Xenophon might be best known for Hellenika which starts as a continuation of the history of the Peloponnesian War at the point where Thucydides abruptly ended his account in 411 BC. Xenophon extends his history to 362 BC, covering several decades after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC. He was well placed to write this history as a participant with many perspectives. Although Xenophon was Athenian, he was exiled and given refuge by the Spartans.

• The Expedition of Cyrus (Anabasis). Translated by Robin Waterfield. 224 pages. This edition is published by Penguin Classics. I would have preferred the Landmark edition but it is out of print. Landmark’s editions of Thucydides and Herodotus are excellent, especially the detailed maps.

• Conversations of Socrates. Translated by Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield. 362 pages. This volume contains Socrates’ Defense, Memoirs of Socrates, The Dinner Party, and Estate Manager.

• Hellenika. Translated by John Marincola. 501 pages. Published by Landmark, this book contains excellent maps in multiple locations of the text along with numerous footnotes, making the history much easier to follow. There are also several helpful essays in the appendix.

The Last Days of Socrates

Author: Plato
Translator: Christopher Rowe
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 211 pages

This Penguin Classics volume contains four of Plato’s Socratic dialogues which relate to the trial and death of Socrates: Euthyphro, The Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo. Although I previously read and wrote about The Apology and Crito, I decided to read them again along with the others included in this book. My motivation was to compare Plato and Xenophon’s depictions of Socrates. Although Plato’s later dialogues are often suspected of putting words into the mouth of Socrates that more accurately represent Plato’s world view, it seems like the events surrounding Socrates’ death are historically accurate. Phaedo is particularly interesting since it represents that final day of Socrates’ life which he spends doing what he most loved: engaging in philosophical debate with his friends right up to the point of drinking the hemlock.

Read my article on Plato’s Apology and Crito

Gateway to the Great Books, Volume 3

Editors: Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins
Year of Publication: 1963
Length: 727 pages

In 1963, Gateway to the Great Books was published “to lead you on, to fortify you, to encourage you, to seduce you into the habit of reading, and in particular into the habit of reading Great Books of the Western World.” Robert Hutchins explains that the ten volume set is meant to serve as an “attractive, instructive, entertaining interlude or supplement” to those who are interested in the Great Books.

At times during the quarter, I found myself with an hour to read which isn’t quite enough time to really get into many of the longer works on my list. So I turned to this volume of the Gateway set which is dedicated to “imaginative literature” and, for the most part, contains shorter works that can be read in an hour or two.

The volume contains works by a variety of authors. I particularly enjoyed Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, and although “enjoyed” is definitely not the right word, I appreciated reading the always haunting The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy for the second time.

Buffett & Munger Unscripted

Author: Alex Morris
Year of Publication: 2025
Length: 473 pages

We are fortunate that Alex Morris decided to take on the task of reviewing every Berkshire Hathaway meeting going back to 1994, distilling the material, and organizing it in a logical way that can be easily referred to. As he writes in the preface of the book, his goal was to unlock this material for the benefit of investors and the business community. He chose to focus on business and investing topics exclusively, which omits many topics related to politics and life lessons. I never get tired of reading about Berkshire Hathaway and thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Read my full review of Buffett and Munger Unscripted

Autobiography of Jack Ringwalt

Author: Jack Ringwalt
Year of publication: 1990
Length: 50 pages

A reader kindly sent me a scanned PDF copy of Jack Ringwalt’s autobiography which was published in 1990 on the fiftieth anniversary of National Indemnity Company’s founding. The book was published in memory of Jack Ringwalt who died in 1984. The story of how Warren Buffett purchased National Indemnity is well known to those familiar with Berkshire Hathaway:

“I really do not believe that our conversation took over fifteen minutes and no price was mentioned by either of us except the $50. I, of course, wondered what would have happened if I would have mentioned $60 or $75, but I am sure that Mr. Buffett will never tell me.”

The account of National Indemnity’s sale only takes a few pages at the end of this short history. It makes for interesting reading and it is unfortunate that the autobiography is not widely available. Unfortunately, I am not able to share the copy I received and will avoid quoting more from it. Perhaps National Indemnity or Berkshire Hathaway might consider reissuing this history at some point.

The Comedies of Aristophanes

Aristophanes lived from 446 BC to 386 BC and wrote at least forty comedies, although only eleven have survived intact. I intended to read one or two of the plays of Aristophanes following my reading of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides last year. However, I enjoyed reading the first couple of comedies and ended up reading them all. At times, I felt lost but the notes in the books, listed below, usually helped to get reoriented. As with all Ancient Greek plays, we find ourselves swimming in unfamiliar waters, immersed in a culture alien to our own. Humor can be highly subjective while tragic situations seem to translate well over the centuries, making ancient comedies more challenging to understand.

One notable difference between the tragedies and the comedies is that tragedies deal with events from Greek mythology that took place in the distant past from the perspective of the audience while the comedies often dealt with current events directly or indirectly. Comedies were critical of political leaders as well as other notable personalities in Athens, including Socrates. The humor can be crude and strange, but through reading the plays, one can get a better sense of what the Ancient Greeks were like as people. If you know what makes people laugh, you’re on the way to understanding their personalities a little better.

I have been writing journal entries about each of the plays I read over the past several months but stopped publishing articles in public. I have found that writing my thoughts on each play, even privately, helps my understanding in a way that reading passively would not. I also find myself referring back to old journal entries when I come across references to plays that I know that I have read but have since forgotten. My Great Books journey is evolving into a more private enterprise than I anticipated, but the reality is that I’d be out of my depths to attempt to write in public on subjects where I’m a total amateur!

• The Birds and Other Plays. Translated by David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein. 336 pages. This volume contains The Knights, Peace, The Birds, Wealth, and The Assemblywomen.

• Frogs and Other Plays. Translated by David Barrett. 275 pages. This volume contains Wasps, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Frogs.

• Lysistrata and Other Plays. Translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. 295 pages. This volume contains The Acharnians, The Clouds, and Lysistrata.

Copyright, Disclosures, and Privacy Information

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC. The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

— Charlie Munger, 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

I started following Berkshire Hathaway in 1995 shortly after reading Roger Lowenstein’s biography of Warren Buffett, The Making of an American Capitalist. It is no exaggeration to say that reading Lowenstein’s book changed my life. I soon discovered Warren Buffett’s letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders and Benjamin Graham’s books. Without this intellectual framework, I surely would have been swept up in the dot com mania of the late 1990s and my limited capital would have vanished.

By the time I purchased my first shares of Berkshire Hathaway in early 2000, I thought that I understood the company and its leaders very well, but I really didn’t have a sense of Warren Buffett’s genius until I attended my first annual meeting in the spring of 2000. That meeting was also my introduction to Charlie Munger, who I knew very little about due to his low public profile at the time. Watching two elderly men answer questions for several hours, seemingly without tiring at all and cracking jokes throughout, was amazing in itself, but it was the substance of their discussion that was truly impressive.

For many decades, the only way to attend an annual meeting was in person. Starting in 2016, annual meetings were webcast live and a few years later, CNBC was authorized to maintain an archive of all annual meetings going back to 1994. This is a treasure trove of wonderful material since we have both video and a transcript for each meeting, but it would be a formidable task to view the hundreds of hours of video, take notes, and distill the material by topic in a useful way.

We are fortunate that Alex Morris decided to take on the task of viewing every meeting going back to 1994, distilling the material, and organizing it in a logical way that can be easily referred to. As he writes in the preface to Buffett & Munger Unscripted, his goal was to unlock this material for the benefit of investors and the business community. He chose to focus on business and investing topics exclusively, which omits many topics related to politics and life lessons.1

Many readers who have attended multiple annual meetings might be skeptical about reading such a book, but chances are that you’ve long forgotten much of what was said at the meetings. In addition, the organization of the book allows the reader to review comments on a particular topic over time. The ability to change one’s mind is critical as new evidence emerges.

For example, in the section covering GEICO and auto insurance, we can see Warren Buffett initially resist the idea of incorporating telematics into the underwriting process. However, over time it became apparent that Progressive’s pioneering use of technology was becoming a competitive advantage. Eventually, Warren Buffett and Ajit Jain acknowledged the need to invest more heavily in technology.

My favorite part of the book was the section covering corporate governance. Perhaps the comments on executive and director compensation resonated strongly because we are in the midst of proxy season. The common “best practices” of corporate America are totally opposed to the common sense wisdom of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, particularly when it comes to stock-based compensation. Their opposition to stock options has been well documented over the years, but the objection was not so much the use of options as the structure of the pay arrangements.

It might surprise some readers to learn that Warren Buffett views stock options for top executives as rational provided that the option’s strike price is adjusted for the cost of capital and retained earnings. In fact, Mr. Buffett has said that Berkshire’s future CEO could logically be paid with options:

“At Berkshire, for those that succeed me and Charlie, anybody that is in the very top position at Berkshire has got the job of allocating resources for the whole place. There could be a logically constructed option plan for that person, and it would make some sense because they are responsible for what takes place overall. But a logically constructed plan would have a cost of capital built into it for every year where we don’t pay dividends. Why should we get money from you for free? We could put it in a savings account and it would grow in value without us doing anything. And a fixed-price option over ten years would accrue dramatic value to whoever was running the place, if they had a large option, for putting the money in a savings account or in government bonds. So there has to be a cost of capital factor in to make options equitable, in my view … They should not be granted at below the intrinsic value of the company.”

— Warren Buffett, 2002 Annual Meeting (p. 140)

I attended the 2002 annual meeting but for some reason I had forgotten Mr. Buffett’s endorsement of the use of stock options, properly structured, for his successor. This is something we should keep in mind when Greg Abel takes over as CEO. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Mr. Buffett also said that it would have been perfectly appropriate for options to have been granted to him and to Charlie Munger:

“There’s nothing wrong with options per se; in terms of Berkshire, it would have been perfectly appropriate if a properly designed option had been given to me or to Charlie. We have responsibility for the whole enterprise, and we believe that any kind of incentive for performance should be related to the area in which you have responsibility.”

— Warren Buffett, 1997 Annual Meeting (p. 148)

So why did Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger never accept stock options? It is clear to me that their restraint was due to a desire to serve as exemplars. Mr. Munger had the following to say in response to Mr. Buffett’s lengthy comments on executive compensation at the 1997 annual meeting:

“We have some wretched excesses in American corporate compensation. I don’t think the excess is necessarily the guy who got the most money. In many cases, I agree with Warren, that the money has been deserved. But such is the envy effect that the practice spreads to everybody else. And then the taxi driver and everybody starts thinking the system is irrational, unfair, crazy. And I think that’s what causes some people, as they rise in American corporations, to, at a certain point of power gaining and wealth gaining, start exercising extreme restraint as a sort of moral duty.”

— Charlie Munger, 1997 Annual Meeting (p. 150)

In other words, it is worth leaving some money on the table when incremental wealth no longer has any possible utility and grasping for every last dollar might cause the overall system grave harm, which would be the case if the majority of the American people come to view capitalism as corrupt or rigged.

It is fascinating to come to the realization that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have always been fully aware that their extreme restraint regarding compensation was not necessary from a moral standpoint. It would indeed have been perfectly fair to compensate both men with properly structured options that reflected the tremendous value generated for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Instead, they both took symbolic $100,000 annual salaries for decades, leaving enormous wealth on the table.

What if Berkshire had granted options to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger over the past half century? Obviously, the magnitude of the effect would depend on the specific terms of the grants, but Berkshire’s terrific performance combined with the effects of compounding would no doubt have made the value of those grants astronomical — certainly well into the tens of billions of dollars. What have Berkshire’s shareholders done to deserve this additional wealth, generated by effectively having Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger work for free all of these years? This is one reason for Berkshire’s “cult-like” following. Even those who have not attempted to figure the amount of this gift know that it is very substantial.

In my opinion, every Berkshire Hathaway shareholder would benefit from reading Buffett & Munger Unscripted, no matter how long they have owned shares or how many meetings they have attended. The passage of time tends to dim the memory and we can all use a refresher course from time to time. The book can be read straight through, as I did over the course of several days, or it can be used as a reference since there are sections organized by topic.2

Reading the book might also be an inspiration for readers to view some of the old annual meetings. I appreciated the fact that many of the meetings from the 1990s were heavily quoted. I did not attend meetings prior to 2000 and I now plan to watch the 1990s meetings in the near future.

Copyright, Disclosures, and Privacy Information

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC. The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Individuals associated with The Rational Walk own shares of Berkshire Hathaway.

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2019: Holiday Book Recommendations
2018: Holiday Book Recommendations

Full Listing of All Book Reviews Published Since 2009

The Plays of Euripides

Euripides lived from 480 to 406 BC and wrote approximately ninety-two plays over his long lifetime. However, only nineteen plays have survived intact, and even these plays have sections that could be later interpolations. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides wrote tragedies that have survived the test of time because they have retained the power to move audiences for nearly 2,500 years. Greek tragedies place characters in impossible situations that often lack any happy resolution. Despite their setting in a distant past full of mythological concepts quite alien to modern readers, we still empathize with their struggles.

During the second and third quarters, I wrote several articles about my reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. While writing these articles helped solidify my comprehension, doing so was extremely time consuming and awkward. I am a novice reader of the classics, not an academic scholar, so my thoughts on these plays are probably amateurish at best. When it came to Euripides, I decided to continue writing, but I did so in a personal journal rather than in public. I did not reduce the intensity of my work, but not hitting the publish button meant that I could write more for myself than for others which is less time consuming.

I learned a great deal from reading the full collection of surviving plays of the Ancient Greek tragedians. Society and technology can change in major ways over the centuries, but human nature itself has barely changed. The passage of 2,500 years means very little in terms of how our minds operate and evolve. The problems that faced humans in Ancient Greece have changed in terms of the specifics, but we are still dealing with the fallen nature of mankind.

Aside from learning important life lessons, these plays deserve to be read purely for entertainment value as well. Almost all of them can be read in two to three hours — about the length of a modern movie. Reading The Iliad and The Odyssey first would be very helpful since the Trojan War forms the backdrop for many plays. It is also useful to have a basic understanding of Greek Mythology.

I read the following volumes covering Euripides. In almost all cases, I read the plays more than one time. After a first reading, I sat down with my journal to read the play again in more depth. In a few cases, I read a play a third time in a different translation. Here are the books I read for this project. All of these volumes have useful introductions, a glossary, and helpful end notes:

• Medea and Other Plays. Translated by Philip Vellacott. 205 pages. This volume contains a very readable verse translation of Medea, Electra, Heracles, and Hecabe.

• Medea and Other Plays. Translated by John Davie. 206 pages. This volume contains a prose translation of Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, and Hippolytus.

• Electra and Other Plays. Translated by John Davie. 267 pages. This volume contains a prose translation of Andromache, Hecabe, Suppliant Women, Electra, and Trojan Women.

• Heracles and Other Plays. Translated by John Davie. 307 pages. This volume contains a prose translation of Heracles, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Ion, Helen, and Cyclops.

• The Bacchae and Other Plays. Translated by John Davie. 360 pages. This volume contains a prose translation of Phoenician Women, Orestes, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Rhesus.

Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor

Author: Donald J. Robertson
Year of Publication: 2024
Length: 248 pages

I previously read How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by the same author when I was sent a review copy by the publisher. Since I found his previous book interesting, I decided to purchase a copy of this brief biography. Robertson does a good job providing an overview of Marcus’ life and the book included some details that I was not previously aware of. Of course, none of these secondary sources are substitutes for reading Meditations itself, but we should keep in mind that Marcus was not attempting to write an autobiography. In fact, he did not intend for Meditations, which was a personal journal, to ever be published at all!

For more information on the life of Marcus Aurelius, I would recommend reading the following articles I wrote several years ago since anything I write here would be redundant:

• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Intelligent Investor, 75th Anniversary Edition

Authors: Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig
Year of Publication: 2024
Length: 583 pages

Last month, I wrote Stepping into the River based on my impressions of reading the latest edition of The Intelligent Investor. That article was not so much a book review as a reflection on why it is important to read certain books more than once. In the case of The Intelligent Investor, it is a good idea to return to the book every few years. It is like going to the church of value investing. Circumstances change but the principles presented by Benjamin Graham are truly perennial.

Jason Zweig deserves tremendous credit for skillfully editing the book and writing original commentary that brings the concepts into the 2020s. I find it remarkable that Zweig did not reuse any of his commentary from the 2003 edition, instead opting to rewrite everything from scratch. When I read the latest edition, I also went back to read his commentary from 2003. I suggest this procedure for everyone because it illustrates how Graham’s concepts applied just as well to the aftermath of the dot com bubble as they do to today’s overheated markets.

Benjamin Graham’s words are presented as they were in his final 1973 edition and there are certainly many specifics that are outdated. Critics can latch on to these obvious cases in an effort to dismiss his entire investment philosophy, but to do so would be the height of folly. Zweig’s main service is demonstrating that the concepts remain true today. Newer investors will especially benefit from the contemporary examples.

The Trail: A Novel

Author: Ethan Gallogly
Year of Publication: 2022
Length: 364 pages

The story is about an older man who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has a dream of hiking the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. His longtime hiking buddy has already died, but he is able to convince his friend’s son to go on the hike. Due to age and frailty, they travel very slowly, taking twenty-eight days to hike around two hundred miles. The journey is both a wilderness trek as well as a spiritual journey, as a young man at the start of his adult life learns from a man approaching the end.

I have hiked the John Muir Trail several times and I found the descriptions of the trail to be accurate. The people encountered during the journey are realistic “types” of hikers I have met over the years, but the author does a good job of not applying stereotypes in a lazy manner. This is definitely not a trail guide or just an adventure story. There are historical interludes throughout the book about the history of the Sierra Nevada mountains as well as digressions into philosophy. The philosophical discussions were particularly interesting because the older man knew much about Eastern philosophy, a subject that I’m unfamiliar with.

For someone who has hiked the trail many times, the book was like a virtual journey since I know all of the places that were described very well. I suspect that readers who are at least somewhat interested in wilderness travel will like this book, although the philosophical discourses will not be to everyone’s tastes.

ESV Study Bible

Publisher: Crossway
Year of Publication: 2008
Length: 1,512 pages (Proverbs to Revelation plus essays)

I read the first half of the ESV Study Bible during the third quarter and completed the book just a few days ago. As I wrote last quarter, this Study Bible does an excellent job of explaining both the old and new testaments in a way that is understandable to the modern reader. In addition to introductions for each book, there are extensive footnotes, maps, and illustrations that greatly help with comprehension.

This project has been very time consuming, but I have no regrets. In addition to my daily readings, I spent an additional fifteen to thirty minutes writing every day. The end result is that I have a reference of my thoughts about the Bible that I can refer to in the future. I would probably recommend taking a full year for this project for most readers, although a half year is possible with a time commitment of at least ninety minutes per day.

I’ve written before than it is essential to understand the Bible if we are to have any hope of understanding Western Civilization. However, the Bible is more than a history book. In its pages, we are presented with moral standards for living a good life and we are given warnings for what to avoid. There are many obscure and seemingly obsolete teachings in the Bible that require context. This is where the ESV Study Bible really shines. The notes tell us what the authors were referring to and how it fit into the context of their times. In many cases, this helps apply the principles to modern life.

I should again note that the ESV Study Bible presents both the old and new testaments in the context of Protestant Christianity. This obviously differs from how Judaism views the Hebrew Bible but it also differs in material ways from Catholicism. The essays at the end of the Study Bible help clarify many theological points and also contrasts the evangelical Protestant viewpoint with other Christian groups. I am sure Roman Catholics and other Christians would beg to differ on many theological points, but that is what makes the study of religion interesting.

Copyright, Disclosures, and Privacy Information

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC. The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

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2021: Q3 • Q4
2020: Complete Reading List • Summer Book Recommendations
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Full Listing of All Book Reviews Published Since 2009

Persian Fire

Author: Tom Holland
Year of Publication: 2005
Length: 401 pages

I read Herodotus in June as part of my Great Books reading project. Although the Landmark Edition provides a great deal of context helpful to the modern reader, I have often found it interesting to pair historical works with contemporary books. I read Tom Holland’s Dominion in 2023, so I was already aware of his narrative style and approach to putting history in context.

I believe that it was wise to read Herodotus before Persian Fire since I could view Holland’s work as a 30,000 foot view of the situation rather than as an authoritative history. Holland had the advantage of centuries of additional scholarship and he was not afraid to challenge some of the more fanciful elements in Herodotus, particularly the wild exaggeration of the Persian forces that invaded Greece.

Greeks considered the Persians and all other non-Greeks to be “barbarians” since they saw their society as the most enlightened civilization. So, it was ironic to read Holland’s account of how Persians viewed the Greeks. From the Persian perspective, the Greeks were the barbarians and amounted to nothing more than annoying “terrorist” states. The fact that a Greek alliance was able to repel Persia shocked the Persians and propelled Athens to decades of dominance in Greece and the Aegean, an era that ended only in the ruins of the Peloponnesian War, the “forever war” of the fifth century BC, documented so well by Thucydides.

History of the Peloponnesian War

Author: Thucydides
Year of Publication: Late 5th Century BC
Length: 636 pages

Thucydides wanted his history of the Peloponnesian War to be a “possession for all time.” Thousands of years later, his book is one of the most important works of antiquity. The book helps the reader understand the forces that lead to war which have not materially changed because these forces are governed by human nature. Weaponry has become exponentially more deadly but human nature has barely changed.

Thucydides was not only a historian but an active participant in the Peloponnesian War. He also had exposure to both sides in the conflict since he was exiled from Athens after a failed military expedition. However, aside from a few references to himself, Thucydides admirably keeps himself out of the narrative and seems to retain his objectivity.

I will refrain from further comments here since I wrote a longer article about the book in August.

Read my article about Thucydides

Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J.D. Vance
Year of Publication: 2016
Length: 261 pages

I first read J.D. Vance’s memoir in the third quarter of 2021, but this was long before he was selected as a candidate for the Vice Presidency. Here are my notes on the book from my first reading:

I first heard about this book during the 2016 election cycle when it was much discussed as a window into the difficulties faced by lower income white people in rural Appalachia and the Midwest. The author subsequently entered politics and is running for election to the United States Senate in 2022 in Ohio. I found the book genuine rather than a typical puff piece written by politicians as they prepare to run for office. In fact, some of the stories in the book are so awful that it is hard to believe that Vance had political ambitions at the time it was written. I have no direct exposure to Vance’s world other than driving through rural Appalachia myself on a few occasions. As an obvious outsider, I’ve always been treated politely, but always as an outsider. I came away from the book with a somewhat better understanding of the problems of the region.

My impression of the book is unchanged. It is clearly a genuine book written by a man who overcame massive obstacles to the success he ultimately attained. That being said, Vance has clearly undergone a political metamorphosis over the past several years, particularly since his successful United States Senate race in 2022. Most obvious is his change of opinion regarding Donald Trump. There is nothing inherently wrong with changing one’s opinion when the facts change, but have the facts changed or is Vance simply changing his tune for political reasons? I suspect the latter, although this is nothing new in politics. It is very alluring to run for an office that’s a heartbeat away from the most powerful political office in the world.

I doubt anyone on the fence in this election will be swayed by reading this book. The better reason to read it is to gain the insights into poverty in Appalachia which presumably was Vance’s original reason to write the book long before he was involved in electoral politics.

A Soldier of the Great War

Author: Mark Helprin
Year of Publication: 1991
Length: 860 pages

I was familiar with the author from reading Digital Barbarism in 2009 which is a work of non-fiction and one of the first books I wrote about on The Rational Walk. For some reason, it took me fifteen years to return to Helprin, but this time I chose one of his novels. I was not disappointed.

The story is initially set near Rome in the 1960s, long after the First World War. Alessandro Giuliani was an old man on the way to catch a tram to take him to the town where his granddaughter’s family lived. When the driver refuses to stop for a young man running to catch the tram, Alessandro exits in protest. Stranded on the road since the tram was the last scheduled for the day, the men start walking toward their destinations. This sets the scene for Alessandro to tell the young man the story of his life in a series of flashbacks that comprise the majority of the book.

Alessandro’s life story is one of an idyllic pre-war period on his family’s estate in Rome and as a university student which is interrupted by the First World War. After volunteering for the navy to avoid trench warfare, Alessandro ends up in the trenches anyway, but he is a lucky survivor. The story of the horrors and futility of war from the perspective of a soldier is timeless. The reader feels like part of the action.

We only get glimpses of what happened in Alessandro’s life after the war which is somewhat frustrating. There is much tragedy in his life, but his overall attitude looking back fifty years after the war is still positive and his conversation no doubt changed the trajectory of his young companion’s life. I can’t say much more without revealing spoilers, so I’ll stop other than to say I enjoyed the book and recommend it!

A Death in Cornwall

Author: Daniel Silva
Year of Publication: 2024
Length: 416 pages

Like clockwork, a new Daniel Silva spy novel comes out every July. I have read them all. At this point, however, I feel like the storylines are getting stale and predictable and the characters never seem to change very much. I suppose this might be inevitable for an author who is writing a fairly long book every single year, but of course adopting such an aggressive publication schedule is a choice, not a requirement.

Investors often refer to “moats” when discussing businesses and the same is true for authors, especially those who have built a loyal readership. Will I read Silva’s next novel? The answer is probably yes because they are still entertaining, despite my grouchy comments, and sometimes it is nice to read an undemanding book during the summer months.

Daniel Silva’s novels are the reader’s equivalent of binging on Netflix. But would it hurt to freshen up the plots and bring in fresh new characters? Maybe take a year off and come up with a better novel in 2026?

The Three Theban Plays

Author: Sophocles
Translator: Robert Fagles
Year of Publication: Fifth Century B.C.
Length: 430 pages

After reading Aeschylus during the second quarter, I read Sophocles this summer. It is tragic that only seven of his plays have survived given that he is known to have written well over a hundred. I highly recommend reading the Greek tragedians because they illustrate the never-changing aspects of human nature in very memorable ways. It is almost shocking to see characters from 2,500 years ago react to situations much like people do today. However, in order to fully appreciate these works of art, it is very important to first read Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and to gain a basic understanding of Greek Mythology.

This book includes three plays by Sophocles covering the story of Oedipus, one of the most cursed characters of Greek Mythology. I wrote an article about these plays so I will not go into further detail here.

Read my article about the Three Theban Plays

Electra and Other Plays

Author: Sophocles
Translator: David Raeburn
Year of Publication: Fifth Century B.C.
Length: 309 pages

This book covers four of Sophocles’ plays, sometimes referred to as the “non-Theban” plays: Electra, Ajax, Women of Trachis, and Philoctetes. Like the Theban plays, each of the plays can be read in one sitting of about two hours and both volumes have detailed notes and introductions to help the modern reader put the stories into context. While I have taken notes on these four plays, I have yet to publish an article. I am considering an article about Electra, one of the main characters in the story of Agamemnon’s ill-fated return from Troy, most comprehensively presented by Aeschylus in The Oresteia trilogy. The story of Electra presented by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides differ in several interesting ways.

ESV Study Bible

Publisher: Crossway
Year of Publication: 2008
Length: 1,128 pages (Genesis to Psalms)

I have read several Study Bibles covering the New Testament and some study guides for selected Old Testament books, but I have never read a Study Bible covering the entire Old and New Testaments. In the third quarter, I started on a six month reading plan covering the entire Bible. My primary purpose this quarter was to better understand the books of the Old Testament covering the ancient history of Israel that coincides with the histories of other ancient civilizations that I have been reading about. This material is primarily presented in 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. Also, the Book of Esther includes many details about Persia, and I found this interesting given my recent reading of Herodotus.

This has been a surprisingly time consuming project. Each of the daily readings in my six month plan takes close to an hour when I include the extensive notes included in the ESV Study Bible. In addition, there are substantial introductions to each book as well as each category of book, along with topical essays. I have also been keeping a journal of each day’s readings in order to record my thoughts which helps in my comprehension. This takes an additional fifteen to thirty minutes per day. The pace, particularly for the Psalms and Proverbs, is far too fast and I would probably opt for a twelve month plan if I was starting the project today. However, I plan to complete my six month plan this quarter.

Readers should keep in mind that the ESV Study Bible contains notes and explanations based on Protestant Christianity. This means that the Old Testament books are interpreted from a Protestant perspective, that is, with Jesus Christ seen as the messiah. I am considering reading Robert Atler’s The Hebrew Bible in 2025 which presents the Old Testament as a self-contained unit, that is, from the Jewish perspective. Also Ignatius Press will soon release a Catholic Study Bible covering both the Old and New Testaments, along with the Apocrypha, which is not included in the ESV Study Bible. I might read this book in 2025 or 2026.

As I wrote earlier this year, I think that it is almost impossible to understand western civilization without understanding the Bible, and like all Great Books, readers can get new insights with each reading, assuming that sufficient time and attention is devoted to the project.

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Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC. The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

In many cases, the gods had virtually assured a certain outcome for unfortunate individuals who were nearly incapable of altering their fate. But even in the most dire of situations, there remained a glimmer of hope that the characters involved might be able to swerve away from imminent disaster. A situation governed purely by fate lacks drama since the outcome is absolutely certain, but human beings always have some agency even if it is highly circumscribed by the situation they find themselves in.

Sophocles was a master of tragic drama and won more awards in competitions than any other playwright in the fifth century B.C. He wrote 123 plays but only seven have survived fully intact. Three of the plays are about a series of tragic circumstances that plagued Thebes, but these plays are not a trilogy like The Oresteia by Aeschylus. Sophocles wrote his plays about Thebes as stand-alone dramas on a subject that was well known to an audience steeped in Greek mythology.

Over the past year, I have been on a mission to read the greatest books of western civilization in an effort to understand our intellectual heritage. My original intent was to write about my journey frequently and I have published many articles. However, all too often, I find it intimidating to write about the great books because they have been thoroughly dissected by centuries of scholars who have spent their lifetimes studying the classics. I am not a trained classicist, just an ordinary person embarking on an intellectual journey.

A healthy approach is to simply write my impressions about these books without attempting to pretend that I have done more than scratch the surface of their deeper meanings. In that spirit, this article presents my thoughts on the tragic life of Oedipus, as told by Sophocles and Aeschylus. I spend more time describing Oedipus the King, the most famous of the plays, while filling out the rest of the storyline as much as possible for an article of reasonable length. This exercise is more for my own benefit than for readers, although perhaps some people will find my thoughts worth reading as well.

The Oracle Speaks

It is impossible to understand the culture of Ancient Greece without being familiar with its mythology. This was a polytheistic world of multiple gods, many of whom maintained rivalries with each other, and they interacted with humans in many ways. Shrines were built to honor the gods and to seek their guidance. The most important such shrine was located at Delphi where the oracle of Apollo prophesied about future events. These prophesies were certainly taken seriously by many individuals, including several kings, including Croesus who tragically misinterpreted a prophesy and lost his kingdom as a result.

There was little ambiguity when King Laius of Thebes approached the oracle at Delphi. His son was destined to eventually kill him. It is not clear whether Laius learned of this prophesy before or after he married Queen Jocasta, but it is clear that when Oedipus was born, the couple knew that they had a problem. The solution, repugnant to modern readers, was that Oedipus was to be killed by exposure on Mt. Cithaeron. The king and queen delegated this task to a shepherd who was ordered to leave the baby on a mountainside, but the shepherd could not do it. He gave the infant to another shepherd from Corinth instead.

King Polybus and Queen Merope or Corinth were childless and the Corinthian shepherd presented the infant to Polybus who decided to raise the child as his own. Oedipus had no knowledge of his adoption and thought that he was the biological child of Polybus and Merope and destined to one day rule Corinth. However, rumors of his adoption were apparently circulating in the community and, when Oedipus grew up, a drunken man told him that he was not the natural heir to the throne. Seeking divine guidance, Oedipus consulted the oracle at Delphi and was given the horrific news that he was destined to kill his father. But it got worse. He was also destined to marry his own mother!

Naturally, Oedipus wanted very much to avoid this cursed fate so he fled from Corinth thinking that if he was no longer present in the city, there is no way the prophesy could come true. The problem is that Polybus and Merope were not his biological parents, so abandoning Corinth did nothing to improve his situation. Instead, fate took him to a crossroads where he encountered King Laius and his small entourage. A dispute ensued and Oedipus killed Laius and his entire entourage except for one man who escaped. Half of the prophesy had come true, even though Oedipus had no idea that the man he killed was his biological father. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

Oedipus Rises to Power

The question of human agency is at the center of this tragedy. Oedipus had unknowingly fulfilled half of the prophesy by taking the life of another man, but could he have avoided taking anyone’s life? Perhaps not, since the legends claim that he acted in self-defense. Fate took Oedipus to the crossroads where he met his biological father and killed him, and free will seemed to have little to do with it. Oedipus could have taken a vow to never kill, but his own life would have ended at the crossroads. Future events would turn out so badly that he probably wished that he had been killed.

Oedipus rose to power in Thebes after he solved the riddle of a monster known as the Sphinx, a creature that was part-human, part-lion, and part-bird. The Sphinx had been oppressing the people of Thebes for a long period of time and promised to relent only when someone managed to solve a riddle: What creature travels on four feet, three feet, and two feet, and is most vulnerable when it goes on four feet? Oedipus solved the riddle by answering than the creature was a man. A baby travels on four feet and soon learns to walk on two feet, but in old age, a man needs a cane and therefore walks on three feet! This caused the Sphinx to commit suicide and Oedipus became the hero of the Theban people … who just happened to be looking for leadership because their king had been killed on the road.

Queen Jocasta must have been a child bride when she married Laius and bore Oedipus, perhaps fifteen years of age or even younger. This is why it is plausible that Oedipus, who was a young man at the time, was considered a potential husband for the queen. Horrifically, Oedipus married Jocasta who might have been in her early to mid-thirties at the time, and the couple had two sons, followed several years later by two daughters. This incestuous relationship was entered into due to total ignorance but the terrible truth is that Oedipus’ children were also his siblings. This state of affairs continued for a couple of decades until the sons were grown men charting their own course in the world. Then, with two young daughters still at home, Oedipus discovered the truth.

The Plague of Oedipus

“Our city — look around you, see with your own eyes — our ship pitches wildly, cannot lift her head from the depths, the red waves of death … Thebes is dying.”

— Oedipus the King (28-31)

A terrible plague was running rampant in Thebes and King Oedipus was at a loss for how to help his people. In desperation, he sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to consult with the oracle at Delphi. The oracle said that the plague would only abate once the killer of Laius was identified and punished. At this point, Laius had been dead for decades and it is not clear why the plague was deferred for so long, but Oedipus was a conscientious ruler and immediately began to seek out the truth about the former king’s murder. This part of the story is the subject of Oedipus the King by Sophocles.

Creon is presented as a somewhat shifty character and he was reluctant to relay the words of the oracle in a public setting, perhaps because he had an inkling of the scandal that was to come. He mentions that one witness survived the incident at the crossroads and Oedipus immediately wants to locate and interview this man. Not only is this necessary for justice and to remove the plague, but Oedipus reasoned that the killer of the former king might also be a threat to his own life.

Sophocles was a genius when it came to creating suspense and irony. The audience knew the story, but Oedipus was ignorant when he made these comments:

“I hold the throne that he [Laius] held then, possess his bed and a wife who shares our seed … why, our seed might be the same, children born of the same mother might have created blood-bonds between us if his hope of offspring had not met disaster — but fate swooped at his head and cut him short. So I will fight for him as if he were my father …”

— Oedipus the King (295-301)

If this isn’t cringeworthy, I don’t know what is! Oedipus gets within an inch of the truth at times in the play well before the truth is finally revealed, and the audience must have sensed the tension of the situation.

We progress to a “shoot the messenger” scenario when Tiresias, the blind prophet, is summoned to help Oedipus locate the killer of Laius. Tiresias clearly knows the entire story. After all, he is a prophet for a reason. But he is wise enough to not want to divulge the truth, knowing that it will cause total havoc in Thebes. So he is evasive and this infuriates Oedipus who accuses the old man of being bribed to remain silent. Oedipus even mocks the prophet’s blindness which will be quite ironic as the story progresses. Oedipus also turns on Creon, claiming that his brother-in-law and Tiresias are somehow in cahoots in a conspiracy to protect the killer.

As Oedipus leaves the stage to re-enter his palace, Tiresias tells the audience the truth:

“Revealed at last, brother and father both to the children he embraces, to his mother son and husband both — he sowed the loins his father sowed, he spilled his father’s blood!”

— Oedipus the King (520-524)

A dialogue between Oedipus and Jocasta slowly starts to unravel the mystery. Jocasta reveals details about the death of her husband that make Oedipus suspect that he was the killer, but at this point he has no clue that Laius was his father. In a later scene Jocasta prays to Apollo and is approached by a messenger from Corinth bringing news of the death of King Polybus. The people of Corinth sent the messenger to tell Oedipus that they want him to serve as their king. Oedipus is initially relieved to learn that Polybus has died of natural causes. Still thinking that he was the biological son of Polybus, he was relieved to “know” that he had not actually killed his “father.” But Oedipus still fears returning to Corinth due to the prophesy that he would marry his mother. At this point, Queen Merope is still alive in Corinth.

After some back-and-forth dialog, the Corinthian messenger reveals that Oedipus is not the biological child of Polybus and Merope. This messenger was the Corinthian shepherd who took Oedipus as an infant and gave him to Polybus to raise as his own child. The Corinthian messenger further reported that he received Oedipus from a Theban shepherd! At this point, Jocasta understands the full horror of the situation and begs Oedipus to drop the inquiry, but Oedipus simply cannot do so. He must know the truth!

Oedipus: “What — give up now, with a clue like this? Fail to solve the mystery of my birth? Not for all the world!”

Jocasta: “Stop — in the name of god, if you love your own life, call off this search! My suffering is enough.”

Oedipus: “Courage! Even if my mother turns out to be a slave, and I a slave, three generations back, you would not seem common.”

…

Jocasta: “Aieeeeee — man of agony — that is the only name I have for you, that no other — ever, ever, ever!”

— Oedipus the King (1160-1167, 1176-1179)

Jocasta rushes off the stage to go into the palace where she commits suicide. Meanwhile, Oedipus summons the Theban shepherd who saved his own life decades earlier. This poor shepherd does not want to reveal the truth and Oedipus threatens to torture him if he will not talk. Eventually, the shepherd is forced to say that he pitied the little boy and decided to save him by giving him to the Corinthian shepherd. At this point, Oedipus has finally learned the truth.

“I stand revealed — at last cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage, cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!”

— Oedipus the King (1308-1310)

Oedipus rushes into the palace to find Jocasta who is already dead. Although Oedipus was, at certain points, suicidal, he chose to inflict upon himself an even more severe punishment. Using Jocasta’s brooches, which were long gold pins, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes so that he would never again have to look upon the world or the children of his cursed marriage — his children who were also his siblings.

“Now I’ve exposed my guilt, horrendous guilt, could I train a level glance on you, my countrymen? Impossible! No, if I could just block off my ears, the springs of hearing, I would stop at nothing — I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison, blind to the sound of life, not just the sight. Oblivion —what a blessing … for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.”

— Oedipus the King (1516-1523)

Oedipus begs Creon for forgiveness, having wrongfully accused him of corruption earlier in the play, and asks to be exiled. At this point, Creon is apparently next in line to take power perhaps because Oedipus’ sons were not yet mature enough. However, Creon apparently did not exile Oedipus immediately, as we will soon discover. Instead, Oedipus continues to live in Thebes, albeit stripped of royal power and he grew dependent on his two young daughters due to his blindness.

Oedipus at Colonus

Although Oedipus was wrong to accuse Creon of corruption during the plague, there was clearly a side of Creon predisposed to cruelty. After several years of allowing Oedipus to remain in Thebes with his daughters, Creon eventually cast Oedipus out of the city. Blind and old, Oedipus relied entirely on Antigone, his loyal daughter, as he wandered around the countryside, destitute and begging for sustenance. We must assume that about a decade has passed since the scandal was revealed since Antigone and Ismene, her sister, were small children in Oedipus the King and are young women in Oedipus at Colonus.

A power struggle has taken place in Thebes since the fall of Oedipus. Creon initially took over as a caretaker King, but eventually the sons of Oedipus came into conflict over who would inherit the throne. Polynices was the firstborn son and logical heir to the throne, but Eteocles somehow gained power and Polynices fled Thebes. Determined to overthrow his brother, Polynices sought an alliance with Argos where he conspired with six other “champions” who would help him defeat Eteocles. This story is told by Aeschylus in more detail in Seven Against Thebes, which describes the actual battle and its aftermath. However, the tension between the sons is a backdrop for Oedipus during the final hours of his life at Colonus, a small village near Athens.

Oedipus and Antigone stumble across a rocky high point near some woods on the outskirts of Colonus. The area was considered to be holy ground because it was the dwelling place for the Furies, the same spirits that haunted Orestes, as I described in my article on The Oresteia. Oedipus is initially mistaken for a vagrant and the local citizens try to chase him away. Their fear grows when Oedipus reveals who he is. His reputation is apparently well known throughout Greece and his arrival is seen as a bad omen. However, Oedipus actually has something to offer that will greatly benefit Athens.

Once Oedipus’ identity is known, the King of Athens, Theseus, arrives and treats Oedipus with considerable kindness under the circumstances. He ends up being a protector of both the blind old man and his daughters when Creon arrives with the intent of bringing Oedipus back to Thebes. However, Creon really intends to continue Oedipus’ exile outside the gates of the city. What could motivate Creon’s action? The oracle at Delphi has revealed that the location of Oedipus’ grave would be the site of a great victory for the city where he is buried. Creon was not interested in restoring any honor for Oedipus, just on a potential military victory for Thebes. When his wicked scheme becomes clear, he abducts Antigone and Ismene and threatens to abduct Oedipus, but Theseus saves them all.

After an unpleasant encounter with his son, Polynices, who Oedipus curses vehemently, presumably due to how his sons treated him in his old age, Oedipus goes to his death accompanied by Theseus who learns the location of the grave and a future Athenian military victory. This is obviously a devastating loss for Antigone and Ismene who reject offers from Theseus to seek refuge in Athens. They opt to return to Thebes because they know that Polynices is on the way to attempt to reclaim the throne from Eteocles. Antigone in particular sees disaster ahead and wishes to avert it if possible.

Antigone’s Misery

Aeschylus tells the story of how Polynices and Eteocles end up killing each other in his play, Seven Against Thebes. Although Thebes successfully repels the attack, the city does not escape further misery due to the desire of Creon to punish Polynices by refusing to grant him proper burial rites. In Antigone by Sophocles, we read about a battle of wills between Creon and Antigone who insists on attempting to bury Polynices even at the risk of her own life. Creon seems blind to the fact that allowing for burial of both brothers might begin to heal the divisions within the city. Even though Polynices was his nephew, Creon is determined to see the young man’s body consumed by birds and dogs, the ultimate insult for any Greek warrior.

When Creon discovers that Antigone is responsible for attempting to provide some limited burial rites for Polynices, he is furious and accuses both Antigone and Ismene of treason, even though Ismene had no role whatsoever in the “crime,” having refused Antigone’s request for assistance. The tragedy of sentencing the women to death is amplified by the fact that Creon’s own son is engaged to Antigone, an apparent match of first cousins. While Ismene is eventually spared from the death penalty, Antigone is sent to a cave to be slowly starved to death. Even the appeal of Haemon, Creon’s son, is insufficient to get the stubborn old man to reconsider.

Tiresias, the same blind prophet who knew the truth about Oedipus and Jocasta, warns Creon that his action would cost him his own flesh and blood and Haemon clearly threatens suicide. Creon exhibits the same stubbornness that Oedipus displayed toward the old prophet, blaming the messenger of bad news for speaking the truth, but eventually Creon reconsiders. But it is too late. Creon goes to the cave where Antigone was sent, but she has already committed suicide. Haemon attempts to attack his father, but when he fails, he falls on his own sword. When Creon’s wife, Eurydice, learns about her son’s death, she also commits suicide. The play ends with Creon in misery, wondering why he should not also be run through with a “good sharp sword.”

The chorus concludes the play:

“Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy, and reverence toward the gods must be safeguarded. The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last these blows will teach us wisdom.”

— Antigone (1465-1470)

Conclusion

The tragedies of Ancient Greece were certainly meant to be entertaining for the large audiences they regularly attracted, but why were people, then and now, attracted to stories that ranged from sad to horrifying? The story of Oedipus and his family is about as awful as one can imagine, yet this is one of the great classics of literature and has enthralled audiences and readers for nearly 2,500 years.

I think that the answer is in the interplay between fate and free will. In particular, we are compelled to consider whether the tragedy was avoidable or if different decisions by the characters could have resulted in a better outcome. Were the oracle’s utterances truly fated to occur, or was human agency a possibility?

If King Laius learned of the oracle’s prophesy before he and Jocasta had children, which seems to be the predominant tradition, he could have taken preemptive action by never having children at all. However, this would deprive him of an heir to the throne and would also require celibacy, both of which were hardly norms in his society. As things stood, Laius and Jocasta decided to deal with the potential future threat posed by their infant son by murdering him, yet they did not do the deed personally and opened up the possibility that their servant would save the child, which ended up taking place.

When Oedipus learned of his fate, as told by the oracle, he thought he was taking preemptive action by fleeing Corinth so he would never be in the position of murdering his father and marrying his mother. At least these were the people who Oedipus thought were his parents. But Oedipus could have taken a step further and vowed a “monastic” life strictly adhering to nonviolence and celibacy in which case none of the disasters of his life could have possibly come true. Was this not a possibility within his control? It would have been a hard, unconventional path, but was it impossible?

Was Creon’s stubbornness regarding punishing the body of Polynices not a matter of free will? The tragedy of Antigone seems to be the one most likely to have been prevented by the exercise of human wisdom. A more charitable mindset toward his nephew would have spared Creon extreme agony and there is little excuse for his behavior. Or is there? There was a matter of principle at stake. Polynices had, in fact, committed treason by attacking his own city. Could Creon have acted more graciously toward Polynices without making it more likely that others would commit treason as well? Could he tolerate Antigone’s opposition and still maintain his authority once he had made his decision?

We should keep in mind that Ancient Greece was a polytheistic society steeped in their mythologies, and the Judeo-Christian values that most of us in the West take for granted did not exist. The will of the gods, many of whom were hardly moral exemplars, put questions of right and wrong in a different context than what we are used to. Additionally, cultural norms have changed dramatically, again due to religious enlightenment. Exposing an unwanted infant to die on a mountain is universally considered a grave crime and a sin today. That was not the case in ancient societies where death from exposure was far more common.

Despite the vast differences between our culture and the world Sophocles lived in, I found the moral questions raised in The Theban Plays endlessly fascinating. There is a reason these plays have stood the test of time and will still be read for as long as human civilization exists. These works make us question our humanity, consider important moral questions, and grapple with seemingly impossible situations where there is no good outcome. We live in a different world but most of us can relate well to dealing with situations where, no matter what we do, we cannot escape a bad outcome. Occasionally having to choose the “least bad” option is unfortunately a perennial part of the human condition.

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— Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.22.4

Introduction

Thucydides set a very high bar in his introduction to The Peloponnesian War, the history of a long conflict in which he had a great deal of skin in the game.

Born in 460 BC, Thucydides was a citizen of Athens and close to thirty years old when the Peloponnesian War begin in 431 BC. Due to his family’s history and influence in Thrace, where Athens had established several colonies, Thucydides was sent to Thrace in 424 BC to protect the cities in the region from Spartan attack. When Thucydides failed to arrive at Amphipolis in time to save the city from Brasidas, the Spartan commander, this caused much alarm in Athens. Ultimately, Thucydides was blamed for the defeat and his punishment was twenty years of exile from Athens.

“I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them. It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely.”

— The Peloponnesian War, 5.26.5

Thucydides was not a man of few words, as the length of his history attests, but he was sparing when it came to inserting himself into the course of events. Other than brief references, his personal role in the war remains in the background and he does not dwell on his exile from Athens. During this period, exile was a severe penalty imposed on citizens. Those who were exiled were permitted to retain property but barred from living in their city. The severity of the punishment should not be underestimated. The dishonor of exile could be viewed as a fate worse than death, which is why Socrates rejected exile and opted for execution.

It is too much to expect Thucydides to be entirely objective when it came to his role in the fall of Amphipolis, but the reader gets the sense that the penalty he suffered was quite harsh given the vagaries of war. To his credit, Thucydides appears to retain his overall objectivity and, despite spending time with enemies of Athens, did not defect to Sparta like some others, such as the mercurial Athenian, Alcibiades, who later fell out of favor in Athens and defected first to Sparta and later to Persia.

I decided to read Thucydides after completing my reading of Herodotus which I wrote about last month. I found the experience of reading Thucydides very different than reading Herodotus because Thucydides is less focused on culture and anthropology. He offers far fewer digressions and anecdotes. Herodotus wrote about the Persian Wars from the perspective of a historian examining events that took place several decades earlier. He had access to individuals who lived through the Persian Wars but had no firsthand experience in that conflict. In contrast, Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War as an active participant who lived through the war and I found his depiction of battles far more comprehensive. While never boring, I did not find Thucydides to be quite as much of a “page turner” as Herodotus, and I would probably opt for Herodotus if I had to choose which historian to meet for a dinner conversation.

In this article, I will restrict myself a few sections of the book that particularly stood out during my first reading. I am planning to read the book a second time in the near future in order to reinforce what I have learned, hopefully as part of a Catherine Project course this fall. It is possible that I will write articles on each of the eight books in Thucydides when I read it for the second time, but for now I will focus on just a few topics that could help those who are deciding whether to read the book.

The Pentecontaetia

What leads a society to seek imperial power? Human ambition is an obvious factor. But in the case of Athens, one must also consider the qualities of the land in Attica. According to Thucydides, the poor soil of Attica made the region unattractive for conquest. As a result, Athens was a “safe retreat” from regional strife elsewhere and this promoted a growing population. But the poor soil made a swelling population unsustainable and this encouraged the Athenians to colonize Ionia on the other side of the Aegean Sea along the western coast of modern-day Turkey.

The defeat of Persia in 479 BC began a period of nearly half a century of Athenian imperialism which is described by Thucydides in a lengthy section of Book 1 referred to as The Pentecontaetia. This section is very useful because it bridges the gap between the end of the history documented by Herodotus and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. In 479 BC, the Persians were dealt a final blow at Sestos, located on the north side of the Hellespont, the narrow passage linking the Aegean and Black Seas. The Spartans, along with their allies from the Peloponnesus, sailed home but the Athenians remained in the region with their Ionian allies and proceeded on a course of empire building. Athens also rebuilt its city walls despite objections from Sparta which had no walls.

In 478 BC, Athens formed a new alliance against Persia with a common treasury set up on the island of Delos, located in the Aegean Sea equidistant from Attica and Ionia. This inaugurated the alliance which came to be known as the Delian League. From the beginning, Athens was the dominant force in the alliance and other allies, many of which had limited naval capacity, paid tribute to Athens in exchange for protection. While the alliance began as a group of autonomous allies that made collective decisions, Athens eventually assume hegemonic powers and other members began to resemble subject states. The fact that allies chose to pay tribute rather than maintain military capabilities led directly to the Athenian capacity for empire.

“… The Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first; and if they had more than their fair share of service, it was correspondingly easy for them to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy. For this the allies had themselves to blame; the wish to get off service making most of them arrange to pay their share of the expense in money instead of in ships, and so to avoid having to leave their homes. Thus while Athens was increasing her navy with the funds they contributed, a revolt always found them without resources or experience for war.”

— The Peloponnesian War, 1.99.2-3

The Delian League began to resemble the Hotel California … allies who joined voluntarily at first and allowed their military capacity to degrade slowly found themselves subject to Athens and were not allowed to leave. Allies had transformed into subject states from which Athens could extract tribute.

As Athens grew dominant on the seas, Sparta remained a formidable land power and consolidated influence as the leading member of the Peloponnesian League. However, Spartan dominance did not include the type of tributary system that Athens put in place over many decades. Lacking a land force competitive with the Peloponnesians, Athens took further steps to fortify the city and built long walls between Athens and the port of Piraeus, such that any invasion of Attica would be unable to penetrate Athens itself. This led to conflicts recorded by Thucydides in The Pentecontaetia which I will not detail here, but eventually a peace treaty was agreed to in 446 BC which was supposed to remain in effect for thirty years.

By 432 BC, Athens and Sparta were on the brink of outright war. As debate raged within both cities, documented by Thucydides in a series of speeches, the realities of the chess board had solidified. Athens was a democracy at home, at least for a subset of the population, but it had become an empire abroad. Far from dismantling the Persian system, Athens had perfected the extraction of tribute from islands in the Aegean and far-flung colonies from Thrace to Ionia. Athens was convinced that it deserved its empire and used restraint with her subjects, and claimed that Sparta ceded her claims in Ionia by sailing home after the Persian Wars rather than remaining in the region. In 431 BC, Sparta voted to declare war against Athens.

“The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.”

— The Peloponnesian War, 1.88.1

The Melian Dialogue

One of the most haunting episodes described by Thucydides is known as the Melian Dialogue which took place in 416 BC during the sixteenth summer of the Peloponnesian War. Melos is an island less than a hundred nautical miles south of Athens and was one of the few colonies established by Sparta. However, the Melians had attempted to maintain neutrality during the war, probably due to fear of the strong naval power of Athens and the limited ability of Sparta to be of assistance in the event of an attack. By 416 BC, the Athenians decided that Melian neutrality was no longer acceptable and send thirty ships and several thousand armed men to pressure the Melians into submission.

Through a series of dialogues, or speeches, Thucydides attempted to reconstruct the negotiations between Athens and Melos. But this was hardly a negotiation because Athens held all of the cards in terms of military superiority and the Athenians did not even pretend to base their demands on higher principles, noting that real negotiations only occur between equals in power and, in other cases, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

A Melian pledge of neutrality was not sufficient for Athens because of the message it might send. In the view of the colonies and other lands subject to Athens, the only reason for Athens to agree to Melian neutrality would be if Melos was perceived to be strong enough to resist. When the Melians appeal to the Athenians to consider how their actions might appear in the eyes of the gods, Athens dismissed the need to do so.

“When you speak in favor of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believed of the gods, or practice among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.”

— The Peloponnesian War, 5.105.1-3

The Melian plea for justice and fair dealings clearly fell on deaf ears. Might makes right, and the Athenians make the case that if the tables were turned, Melos would surely attempt to subjugate Athens in just the same way. The Athenians also cast doubt on the possibility that Sparta would have the desire or ability to come to the aid of Melos in a conflict. Melos is offered the opportunity to do the only prudent thing, that is, to subject themselves to Athens as a tribute-paying “ally.” In this manner, the Melians could continue to enjoy their country and avoid certain destruction.

But the Melians were not buying this argument.

“Our resolution, Athenians, is the same as it was at first. We will not in a moment deprive of freedom a city that has been inhabited these seven hundred years; but we put our trust in the fortune by which the gods have preserved it until now, and in the help often, that is, of the Spartans; and so we will try and save ourselves. Meanwhile, we invite you to allow us to be friends to you and foes to neither party, and to retire from our country after making such a treaty as shall seem fit to us both.”

— The Peloponnesian War, 5.112.2-3

Athens proceeded to construct a wall around the Melians and began a siege which lasted into the winter season, maintained by a small garrison left behind when the majority of the Athenian forces withdrew from the island. When Melos succeeded in making progress against the shrunken Athenian lines, reinforcements were sent from Athens and the Melian surrender soon followed. The Athenians proceeded to put to death all adult males. All of the women and children were sold into slavery and Athens sent five hundred colonists to repopulate Melos as a new territory.

The Athenians were correct in the short run. Melos had no ability to resist and perhaps the Athenian actions taken in response intimidated other subjugated territories. However, this type of behavior obviously did not inspire much loyalty. As the war dragged on, Athenian territories were quick to defect to the Spartans when the opportunity arose. Far from being loyal allies, Athens was running a tyrannical empire from which subjected people were eager to escape when presented with a viable opportunity.

Disaster in Sicily

The voluntary opening of a new front in a war is not a step to be taken lightly when the enemy is far from being defeated. This is the decision that faced Athens in the winter of 415 BC when a vigorous debate took place regarding whether Athens should expand the war to Sicily.

Nicias was a wealthy Athenian politician and general who warned against such an expedition at a time when there were enemies to be fought closer to home, despite a fragile treaty that was then in place with Sparta. Nicias was against the idea of “grasping at another empire before we have secured the one we have already.” Given the distance between Athens and Sicily, Nicias believed that it was unlikely that the Sicilians could be permanently subjugated. At the time, many of the younger men were agitating for the expedition and Nicias urged older men to use their hard fought wisdom to resist a rash action that could lead to disaster.

Alcibiades was one of the hawkish young aristocrats and he represented the other side of the debate. The essence of his argument was that Sicily was not a great power but a “rabble” that could not be united into a coherent defensive force. As a result, Athens would have few problems defeating what amounted to a mob of competing interests. Furthermore, he used the pretext of coming to the aid of allies in Sicily that have called for help, despite the fact that the Sicilians never came to the aid of Athens in war. This one-sided “alliance” did not bother Alcibiades who sought glory in war and conquest. He was in favor of preemptive war, arguing that “men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made.”

The supposed glory of war is a powerful lure and the arguments of Alcibiades won over his fellow citizens as “everyone fell in love with the enterprise” and “the few that did not like it feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet.”

Thucydides devotes a great deal of time to detailing the Sicilian expedition which I will not attempt to describe in this article. Ultimately, the expedition ended in total disaster in 413 BC at Syracuse when Athens lost all of the naval and land forces it had sent. Nicias, who had accepted a command despite his objections, was one of the generals “butchered” by the Sicilians when his forces surrendered. His surviving army was held in deplorable conditions in quarries outside Syracuse for eight months before being sold as slaves.

Athens was shocked by this turn of events and while the war continued for another nine years, the aura of invisibility was gone. Overconfidence and hubris led the Athenians to voluntarily open a new front in the war which cost them dearly in terms of resources and soldiers.

Conclusion

The defeat of the forces in Sicily emboldened enemies of Athens in the subsequent years. Although the history documented by Thucydides ends abruptly in 411 BC, we know from other sources that Athens was finally defeated in 404 BC with a total Spartan military victory in the Hellespont which led to a final blockade of Athens. Sparta considered the option of totally destroying Athens but settled for confiscating the remnants of the Athenian fleet and ordering the demolition of the city’s walls.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Thucydides documents all of the twists and turns of the war in much detail and this would be impossible to summarize in a single article. Books have been written analyzing Thucydides and the implications of his history. In this brief article, I have merely scratched the surface, but I think certain lessons can be drawn from this limited coverage.

Human nature does not change much, if at all, over thousands of years of history. As I read Thucydides, I could easily draw parallels between the attitudes and decisions made by men who lived 2,500 years ago and people living in much more recent times. The causes of war have hardly changed and the attitudes that lead to war never change. After a major war, the generation with direct experience in the horrors is normally loath to enter into any new voluntary conflicts, but as time fades memories and a new generation assumes power, the supposed glory of war begins to attract men out to make names for themselves.

When people think about democracy in Ancient Greece, many picture a group of small city-states that offered a voice to all people. Of course, those who have even scratched the surface know that the majority of people were disenfranchised in these societies which were run by the elites with the power to vote. This does not diminish the importance of studying democratic institutions of the period, but we should not romanticize what these societies were actually like. Athens had democratic institutions at home but ran a tyranny abroad. Sparta, which I have barely discussed in this article, was a highly communal and militarized society with very little individual liberty. These societies are hardly ideal models in the modern era.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Ancient Greek society, and its gods, seemed to subscribe to a “might makes right” philosophy that seems abhorrent today. The Melian Dialogue and its aftermath might shock people today, but such genocides were not at all uncommon in the ancient world. Prior to the firm establishment of Christianity under the Roman Empire, the idea of the weak having universal human rights was a radical concept. The idea that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” was very much a mainstream concept.

I would encourage curious readers to study Thucydides. Those who decide to do so should consider buying the Landmark edition which has extensive footnotes, maps, and supplementary information that proved to be essential. Attempting to read Thucydides without any context or maps would be an exercise in frustration, but the efforts of Robert B. Strassler and the others who contributed to the Landmark made the process very enjoyable.

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Human beings are endlessly fascinating creatures.

We are the most advanced life form on Earth, yet human nature suffers from serious flaws that have caused tragic consequences throughout history. We can only begin to come to grips with the flaws of humanity by studying the tiny fragments of our history that have survived antiquity and remain accessible to us today. It is tragic that so many people regard history as boring. Reciting endless facts and figures can often be boring. But describing history through the actions of flawed human beings is anything but boring.

Herodotus is often described as the father of history for his epic narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century BC. However, his interests were wide ranging and he recognized that fully understanding the history of war requires an examination of geography, natural history, anthropology, and human nature. As a result, Histories presents the reader with a sweeping view of the ancient world. More specifically, Herodotus describes the land, people, and culture of the Mediterranean in much detail, with attention also paid to more distant lands including Scythia and the Indus Valley.

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, a Greek colony located in Asia Minor. Much of the action in his history takes place in what is modern-day Western Turkey in the struggle for power between the Greeks and the Persians, so Herodotus had the benefit of knowing the region well from personal experience. He also traveled widely around the Mediterranean and presented the reader with first-person accounts. He spoke to a wide variety of people and often reported on what he was told with some skepticism, suggesting that the reader should weigh the stories he conveys and decide for themselves. In a world before widespread written records, Herodotus had to rely on oral history and his own judgment. Much of the contemporary criticism of his work attempts to judge Herodotus by the standards of modern scholarship that would have been impossible to adhere to in the fifth century BC.

The Greek victory over Persia took place in 479 BC when Herodotus was just five years old. Throughout most of his six decades of life, Herodotus would have had access to men who had first-hand experience fighting in the wars, and the richness of his accounts of the battles reflects this. However, first-hand accounts of war can often be distorted, particularly when it comes to the size of opposing forces. In the extensive footnotes and appendices of The Landmark Herodotus, the reader is given some guidance on areas where modern historians differ with Herodotus. In particular, the size of the Persian forces that invaded Greece in 480-479 BC was most likely vastly overstated by Herodotus.

Was Herodotus a propagandist, writing a story intended to build up a glorious Greek victory, or did he just make some honest mistakes? After spending over thirty hours in a long “conversation” with Herodotus, I think it is clear that he strived to convey an accurate picture of the world as he saw it, but he had to contend with very serious limitations that modern-day scholars scarcely need to think about.

Here is the very first line of the book describing his motive for preserving his research:

“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds — some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians — not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.”

Much of what we know about the fascinating world of the ancient Mediterranean region and beyond is due to the tireless efforts of Herodotus to bequeath his knowledge to future generations. His work was considered important during his lifetime and in the centuries that followed, and this resulted in its preservation over the past 2,500 years. Like all great written works, Herodotus resists being summarized.

The history of the Greco-Persian Wars is available on many websites, and it is far easier to turn to these secondary sources if the primary goal is to simply understand the broad contours of that series of conflicts. However, readers who take the time to learn directly from Herodotus benefit from the insights of a man who was far closer to the actual events and had access to men who bore witness to what took place.

Herodotus is sometimes criticized for his digressions, but I found those sections of the book most fascinating. In this article, I’ll discuss one early digression and then turn to the specific features that make the Landmark edition of Herodotus so useful for modern readers.

Richer Than Croesus

Early in his history, Herodotus spends a great deal of time describing the rise and fall of Croesus of Lydia who reigned in the mid-sixth century BC, long before the Greco-Persian conflict. Many readers are likely to be familiar with the expression that someone is “richer than Croesus” which refers to his vast wealth.

Croesus took power in 560 BC when his father died after a fifty-seven year reign. Croesus added to the conquests of his father and, at the height of its power, the Lydian empire encompassed most of Western Asia Minor, which is part of modern-day Turkey. Readers familiar with the New Testament will recognize many of the locations in the Lydian empire since St. Paul would stop in many of these cities on his missionary journeys over five hundred years later.

The quest for power and wealth drove nearly all early rulers. Croesus subjugated the people and extracted tribute. From his throne in the ancient city of Sardis, Croesus was riding high and viewed himself as unassailable and perhaps even the happiest man in the world, but as Proverbs 16:18 attests, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Croesus was on top of the world and was headed for a fall.

A wise man from Athens arrived at Sardis. His name was Solon and he was on a trip to see the ancient Mediterranean world. When he arrived, he was treated with customary hospitality at the court of Croesus. After a few days of rest, Croesus gave Solon a tour of his vast treasures. Knowing that Solon had traveled widely, Croesus eagerly asked whether anyone else surpassed him in happiness and prosperity. Much to Croesus’s disappointment, Solon identified several other men as candidates for most fortunate.

Solon identified a profound philosophical truth: one cannot judge whether a man was truly happy and prosperous until knowing how his life will end. If a typical human life encompasses seventy years, that translates to about 25,000 days of life. Solon’s point was that so much of human life boils down to luck and a single day out of the 25,000 could bring about events totally different from all of the other days of a man’s life. Solon could not judge the great king’s happiness until he learns how his life has ended.

“You see, the man who is very wealthy is no more happy and prosperous than the man who has only enough to live from day to day, unless good fortune stays with him and he retains his fair and noble possessions right up until he departs this life happily.

For many wealthy people are unhappy, while many others who have more modest resources are fortunate. The man who has great wealth but is unhappy outdoes the fortunate man in only two ways, while the fortunate man outdoes him in many ways. The former is more capable of gratifying his passions and of sustaining himself in adversity, but the fortunate man, although he does not have the same ability to sustain himself in adversity or passion, avoids these anyway by virtue of his good fortune.

Moreover, he has no injury, no sickness, no painful experiences; what he does have is good children and good looks. Now if, in addition to all these things, he ends his life well, too, then this is the man you are looking for; he alone deserves to be called happy and prosperous. But before he dies, refrain from calling him this — one should rather call him lucky.”

— Herodotus 1.32.5-7

Croesus was not convinced and he angrily dismissed Solon from his court, “thinking him worthless and extremely ignorant” but he should have instead thanked Solon for the warning. Croesus would be severely tested by unimaginable adversity in the years to come.

Croesus had a dream in which he was told that he was fated to lose his son who would be mortally wounded with an iron spear. Naturally, Croesus thought that he could prevent this tragedy by stopping his son from participating in wars, so he stripped him of his military title. Croesus even tried to prevent the young man from joining a hunting expedition, but this emasculated his son and caused great distress in a society that prized physical valor. His son could hardly show his face in public while being treated as a child.

Croesus finally relented and allowed his son to join a boar hunt. Tragically, he was hit by a javelin which missed the boar and the young man died. Croesus was obviously saddened by this event but attributed the tragedy to the will of one of the gods. Obviously, it was impossible to restore his son’s life no matter how much wealth and power the king had access to. His remaining son was afflicted by muteness and was hardly a suitable heir to the throne. Maybe Solon was right.

After losing his son, Croesus felt a great degree of risk aversion, no longer seeing himself as invincible. His empire sat to the west of a rising Persian power and Croesus decided that he needed to consult the Oracle of Delphi before challenging Persia for regional supremacy. After sending large gifts to Delphi, his representatives were told that if Croesus were to wage war against Persia, he would destroy a great empire. This overjoyed Croesus when he received the news! The Oracle had obviously predicted that he would be victorious over Persia and greatly expand his empire to the east.

While the Oracle could generally be trusted to tell the truth, one had to fully consider the response rather than to merely hear the most favorable interpretation. When the Oracle predicted that a great empire would be destroyed, it was not stated which empire would be destroyed. It turned out that the empire that Croesus would destroy by waging war against Persia was his own empire.

When the Persians overran Sardis after a siege, Croesus was captured. His fourteen year reign had come to an inglorious end. Cyrus, the King of Persia, ordered Croesus to be put to death by being burned alive upon a pyre. At this point, Croesus remembered the words of Solon.

“And now everything had turned out just as Solon had said, and indeed it was clear that his words applied no more to Croesus himself than to the whole human race, and especially to all those who consider themselves happy and prosperous.”

— Herodotus 1.86.5

As Croesus related the tale of Solon to Cyrus while on the pyre, Cyrus had a change of heart and began to fear retribution if he allowed the execution to proceed. But it was too late. Cyrus ordered the pyre to be extinguished but it had already begun to burn out of control. Croesus called out to Apollo to save him and suddenly a heavy rainstorm extinguished the fire. Croesus was saved. Cyrus viewed this event as divine intervention and ordered Croesus to be untied and treated him with great respect. While no longer a king, Croesus went on to serve as an advisor of Cyrus and his son in events recounted later by Herodotus.

This is a great story, but it should be noted that it is highly improbable that Solon and Croesus ever met. The Landmark Edition notes that Solon served as archon of Athens in 594-93 BC and was likely dead for many years before Croesus assumed his throne in 560 BC. Whether Herodotus believed his sources to be true and was simply mistaken or just felt that this was a great story to tell is not clear. Herodotus wrote his history a century after the Lydian/Persian war and he did not have access to the kind of written records modern historians take for granted.

The Landmark Edition

I would encourage anyone interested in the ancient world to read Herodotus, but it is easy to get bogged down and frustrated. Herodotus was presenting his work to his contemporaries who were very familiar with the geography and culture of the ancient world. Modern readers, especially those who are products of American schools in the twenty-first century, lack any meaningful knowledge of this world. We badly need context, maps, and guides to follow what Herodotus has to say.

I own a copy of Great Books of the Western World, a fifty-four book set that includes Herodotus but provides very limited context or supplementary information. This is consistent with the philosophy of the editors, as explained in The Great Conversation, the first book in the set. I have doubts about whether the typical reader in 1954 could have understood Herodotus without supplementary materials and I am certain that today’s reader cannot do so. I certainly would have been lost without context, maps, and extensive notes.

Fortunately, the Landmark Edition has an excellent introduction along with extensive footnotes, a glossary, and an appendix with numerous articles that provide the background information most contemporary readers lack. Best of all, the book contains excellent maps that are usefully presented. While the maps are often repetitive, showing the same regions multiple times, the editors highlight the cities and geographical features relevant to the nearby text. This makes it easy to locate places that Herodotus discusses.

In this article I did not attempt to provide any information about the main subject of the book, the Greco-Persian war. This is not because that conflict was unimportant, but because it would be next to impossible to “summarize” the war in a useful way that is not readily available elsewhere. Herodotus methodically sets the stage for the conflict by providing the reader with a tour of the ancient world, delving deeply into the culture and history of the people involved. When Persia invaded Greece, their army and navy was comprised of their subjects from all across the empire. It was a truly multi-cultural force.

The victory of the Greek alliance launched a golden age for Athens that lasted nearly fifty years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war. I think that a parallel can be drawn between the golden age of Athens in the mid fifth century BC and the American golden age following the Second World War. Both cases feature a civilization at the height of its power and prestige.

Athens was brought down by a “forever war.” American civilization still stands despite nearly constant wars during the twenty-first century and a massive erosion of trust in our society. Hopefully, we will experience a happier eventual outcome, although our trajectory is currently leading in a very negative direction.

Reading Herodotus is an essential preparation for reading Thucydides who wrote the most comprehensive account of the Peloponnesian War. I plan to write about Thucydides later this month.

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Full Listing of All Book Reviews Published Since 2009

The Odyssey

Author: Homer
Year of Publication: ~8th Century BC
Length: 139 pages (Samuel Butler’s translation)
Length: 582 pages (Emily Wilson’s translation)

I read two translations of The Odyssey in April:

• Samuel Butler’s translation was first published in 1900 and it is included in Great Books of the Western World, a set of fifty-four books that I acquired earlier this year. Butler’s prose translation is not among the more popular translations of The Odyssey today, but I found it relatively easy to follow. One potential obstacle for some readers will be Butler’s use of the Roman names for the Gods, but this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Butler wrote a fine translation that remains relevant today.

• Emily Wilson’s translation was published in 2017. This was my second reading. Wilson translated Homer in verse and she provides the reader with an introduction that includes much context especially useful for the first-time reader. In addition, there are detailed end notes, a glossary, and several maps. I found Wilson’s poetic translation very enjoyable to read and I think first-time readers should opt for her translation. Consider reading the introduction after reading The Odyssey to avoid spoilers.

There’s a large difference in the page counts for the translations, but this is due to the very small type and narrow margins in the Butler translation. The time required to read each translation is roughly the same. It is easier to take notes in the wider margins of the Wilson translation.

Readers who are interested in more of my thoughts on The Iliad and The Odyssey can follow the links below for articles with more details:

• The Iliad, April 5, 2024

• The Odyssey, May 7, 2024

Homer and His Iliad

Author: Robin Lane Fox
Year of Publication: 2023
Length: 399 pages

After spending a great deal of time reading two translations of The Iliad in March, I decided that it would be interesting to read one of the many contemporary books that provide analysis of Homer and his epic poems. Robin Lane Fox considers The Iliad to be the world’s greatest epic poem. Studying Homer has been one of his lifelong pursuits and this book is the culmination of over fifty years of reading and research.

Fox is not afraid to wade deep into the controversy surrounding Homer. We know very little about Homer, when he lived, and how his poems were composed. Fox believes that there was a historical man named Homer who composed The Iliad in the mid-eighth century BC. Many other scholars prefer a later date for The Iliad and some attribute the work to an evolving oral tradition that took shape over a very long period of time. There is only so much we can know about Homer and the period in which he lived, but we do know that The Iliad was a foundational element of Greek society by the sixth century BC.

Anyone who is interested in Western Civilization must study Ancient Greece, and there is no way to comprehend that society without a firm understanding of Homer’s epic poems. I found Fox’s book useful but it is a “deep dive” into the subject. Emily Wilson’s introductions provide sufficient background to understand Homer so I would only recommend Fox’s book to those who are especially motivated to learn more.

Greek Society

Author: Frank J. Frost
Year of Publication: 1992
Length: 223 pages

Several years ago, I gave away the vast majority of my books in an effort to downsize during a move, something I greatly regret today. Somehow, Greek Society survived the downsizing. I first read this book as a freshman or sophomore in college as part of a class on Western Civilization. An inspection of the book shows that I underlined passages and took notes, but I had no recollection of it when I found it recently.

Greek Society is a well written account that is more like a textbook compared to Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, which I reviewed earlier this year. I liked Frost’s chapter on the economic system in Ancient Greece which included information regarding the cost of living. It is difficult to make comparisons, but in general, the cost of necessities such as clothing were very expensive compared to wages. Homeric heroes regularly sacrificed animals for epic banquets but the typical Greek laborer would have seen meat as a luxury.

Jefferson the Virginian

Author: Dumas Malone
Year of Publication: 1948
Length: 470 pages

Dumas Malone devoted decades of his life to producing his six volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. In Jefferson the Virginian, he covers the first four decades of Jefferson’s life up to the point where he leaves for France in 1784. Since this book covers Jefferson’s early life, it provides great insight into his education and the ideological formation of one of the most consequential of the Founding Fathers.

I’ve read all of the volumes of Malone’s biography of Jefferson in the past, and this is the third time that I read Jefferson the Virginian. My motivation for reading this book again was to better understand the period surrounding the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s role in crafting the lofty language of the Declaration is beyond serious dispute, but there is no doubt that he operated in an intellectual environment influenced by many other great men who shaped his thinking.

Malone was once regarded as the preeminent Jefferson scholar but has more recently been accused of writing a hagiography. While it is true that Malone had admiration for his subject, it is not true that he covers up the inherent contradictions in Jefferson’s character. However, most of those contradictions appeared later in Jefferson’s life. During his youth and early adulthood, Jefferson’s life was more consistent with his values than it was in old age, when the ravages of time and excessive debts took their inevitable tolls.

Related Article: Thomas Jefferson’s Advice to His Nephew, May 18, 2024.

Theogony and Works and Days

Author: Hesiod
Year of Publication: ~700 BC
Length: 79 pages

Hesiod was a poet who lived in Greece in the eight century BC. We do not know the exact span of his life and it is possible that he was active even before Homer. He lived toward the end of what is known as the Greek Dark Age, a period from 1200 BC to 800 BC when civilization had regressed and the written script of the Mycenaean civilization fell out of use.

Hesiod and Homer composed poetry in the oral tradition, but the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet in Greece allowed their works to be preserved. While Homer is far more celebrated today, Hesiod provides a very interesting window into Ancient Greek civilization on the cusp of revitalization that would last several centuries and culminate in a new golden age.

Read my Review of Works and Days

The Oresteia

Author: Aeschylus
Year of Publication: 458 BC
Length: 335 pages

The Oresteia is comprised of three tragic plays produced by Aeschylus in 458 BC. The trilogy is an undisputed classic that has captivated audiences and readers for twenty-five centuries. Aeschylus assumed a certain level of familiarity with the Greek gods and mythology and this could be taken for granted in a society immersed in these characters since childhood. His plays were produced for a wide audience, not for elite scholars. But as the centuries passed, fewer people retained knowledge of ancient mythology.

I recommend reading The Iliad and The Odyssey before reading the plays, and it helps to have an understanding of mythology. I had a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology by my side while reading the plays.

Read my Review of The Oresteia

American Sphinx

Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Year of Publication: 1998
Length: 307 pages

Joseph Ellis provides the reader with a skeptical interpretation of Thomas Jefferson in this book. His goal was to discover more about Jefferson’s complex personality and character based on several periods during his long life. I first read American Sphinx shortly after it was published and decided to return to it after reading the first volume of Dumas Malone’s six volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. I do not regard American Sphinx as a comprehensive biography of Jefferson because it skips over periods of his life, but it is an interesting study of his character.

Thomas Jefferson had a highly complex relationship with the institution of slavery, and this has been his most significant weak spot when it comes to assessments of his character. One of the reasons Jefferson receives so much modern-day criticism is that he was acutely aware of the moral bankruptcy of slavery during his lifetime, in contrast to many of his Southern contemporaries who saw few, if any, moral quandaries. Naturally, we hold someone who understood the moral dilemma to a higher standard, but it is still important to view Jefferson in the context of his times. Ellis is skeptical but he tries to be fair.

The Mountain Shadow

Author: Gregory David Roberts
Year of Publication: 2016
Length: 871 pages

I read Shantaram in the second quarter of 2023 and briefly wrote about it. The Mountain Shadow is the sequel set approximately two years after the conclusion of Shantaram. Both novels are at least partly based on the author’s own life after escaping from prison in Australia and migrating to Bombay in the 1980s. The main protagonist regularly engages in criminal activity and even joins the local mafia, but unlike most of the gang members, he maintains a moral compass.

Most of the books I read this quarter were very “serious” in terms of the time and effort required on the part of the reader. In contrast, The Mountain Shadow is light reading that takes no particular effort. It is the equivalent of sitting down to relax by watching Netflix, except you are engaging with the written word. This is not meant as any offense to Gregory David Roberts. He is an outstanding writer who can keep a reader engaged over hundreds of pages, and that’s a rare skill.

Although Shantaram and The Mountain Shadow can be read separately as stand-alone works, I would suggest reading Shantaram first. Readers who enjoy it can proceed to read The Mountain Shadow which continues the story and ties up some loose ends that were unresolved at the end of Shantaram. It is difficult to say much more about these books without giving away elements of the plot.

American Scripture

Author: Pauline Maier
Year of Publication: 1998
Length: 288 pages

In American Scripture, Pauline Maier provides an excellent account of the conditions leading up to the drafting of the declaration, how the document was prepared by Thomas Jefferson and amended by his colleagues, and how Americans viewed the declaration at the time and in the decades that followed.

I think that “scripture” is an accurate description of the Declaration of Independence, although obviously this is secular “scripture.” That point is important in a country like the United States without an official state religion. Every country needs to have a set of core beliefs shared by the vast majority of citizens or it will disintegrate. For many societies, that common set of beliefs is delivered by religion. In the United States, our common beliefs come from the Founding Fathers.

Read my review of American Scripture

Prometheus Bound and Other Plays

Author: Aeschylus
Year of Publication: 5th Century BC
Length: 160 pages

Given my experience with reading The Oresteia, discussed earlier in this article, I approached the four other surviving plays of Aeschylus with some trepidation and I expected to be similarly challenged. To my surprise, I found Prometheus Bound, The Supplicants, Seven Against Thebes, and The Persians far easier to follow during my first reading. These plays were translated by Philip Vellacott who also wrote a brief introduction.

I am not sure if it was easier to read this book because the plays are themselves easier or because I gained experience reading Aeschylus. For readers new to Aeschylus, it might be easier to start with this book, although I do not feel strongly about the sequencing.

Read my review of Prometheus Bound

The Histories

Author: Herodotus
Year of Publication: 5th Century BC
Length: 849 pages

I finished reading Herodotus just a few days ago. I plan to write a longer article about The Histories in the near future because it left quite an impression. I diverted from reading the Greek tragedians to Herodotus because I was intrigued by The Persians, one of the plays of Aeschylus, which made reference to the great Greek victory over Persia in 480/479 BC. Herodotus wrote about far more than the Persian Wars, but the Greek triumph was the culmination of his work.

I would highly recommend reading The Landmark edition of The Histories, which is the version I have linked to. Edited by Robert B. Strassler, this book provides an enormous amount of supplementary material that is crucial for the modern reader who does not have an academic background. In contrast, the version of The Histories included in Great Books of the Western World, provides almost no supplementary material at all.

In addition to an excellent introduction, every page of The Histories includes numerous footnotes (rather than endnotes) that are right on the same page and very easy to refer to. There are summaries of the contents of each of the hundreds of small chapters right next to the main text. Perhaps best of all, there are hundreds of maps throughout the book, focusing on the events happening on the same page or nearby pages. Some readers might find the maps repetitive, since they cover the same regions again and again, but it was so much easier to follow the events with this approach, especially toward the end of the book when Herodotus writes about troop movements and battles.

I will soon publish an article that goes into much more detail.

New Testament Study Bible

Publisher: Ignatius Press
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 521 pages

I read the New Testament in small installments over the course of the second quarter. This version of the New Testament includes a large number of notes on each page as well as introductions for each of the books. The Ignatius Press presents the Roman Catholic view of the New Testament, which I understand differs in material ways from the view of the Protestants. In the second half of the year, I am reading the ESV Study Bible which covers both the Old and New Testaments with commentary from a Protestant perspective.

All Christian Bibles provide interpretation of the Old Testament as a foreshadowing of the New Testament. In 2025, I am considering reading The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Atler. This would be an exercise in understanding the Old Testament from the Jewish perspective, something I have not done. As I explained earlier this year, the Bible must be considered one of the Great Books of the Western World whether viewed as a religious text or not. I enjoy reading the Bible and recommend taking the time to know it. It is very hard to fully understand Western society and history without knowing the Bible very well.

I am often asked how I am able to read so many books. I won’t deny that the reading presented here is time consuming. However, it is not some Herculean task.

I read over 5,000 pages during the second quarter. That works out to about 55 pages per day. I am not a particularly fast reader and I estimate that I spend between two and a half hours per day, on average. It obviously depends on the type of book. I can get through far more pages of something like The Mountain Shadow in an hour compared to Aeschylus or Herodotus. But the main point is that I am not cloistered in some monastery, never going outside and reading all of my waking hours.

For those who would like to read more, I would suggest starting with a dedicated hour per day. It is surprising how much can be accomplished through a sustained habitual effort. Most people waste at least an hour per day on television or social media. It is all about priorities.

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My reading of The Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, was a challenge. Multiple readings were required to even begin to comprehend the plot even though I was already familiar with the rough outline of events thanks to the summary in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Agamemnon’s story is well known and his character is familiar to anyone who has read The Iliad. My difficulties were not due to any deficiency in the translation of The Oresteia by Robert Fagles. His introduction and end notes were excellent and indispensable resources.

Given my prior experience with Aeschylus, I approached his other four surviving plays with some trepidation and I expected to be similarly challenged. To my surprise, I found Prometheus Bound, The Supplicants, Seven Against Thebes, and The Persians far easier to follow during my first reading.

These plays were translated by Philip Vellacott who also wrote a brief introduction. Although end notes are provided, they are far less extensive, but for the most part I was able to follow the dialogue without any problems, with occasional recourse to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Was my easier experience due to growing familiarity with Aeschylus or the pattern and tempo of Ancient Greek tragedy in general? Perhaps so, although I suspect that readers new to Aeschylus would be well served by starting with this volume before reading The Oresteia.

Unfortunately, three of the plays are parts of trilogies where the other plays have not survived. In the case of Prometheus Bound and The Supplicants, we have the opening play of two trilogies and in the case of Seven Against Thebes, we have the conclusion of a trilogy. The Persians, in contrast, survives as a stand-alone celebration of Greek victory in the Persian Wars. It is depressing to learn that Aeschylus wrote between seventy and ninety plays during his lifetime and only seven remain. Fortunately, classicists such as Edith Hamilton have been able to reconstruct the outline of mythological legends by relying on secondary sources. The plays survived for long enough to allow others to mention them in writing that has survived.

This article presents my thoughts on the most famous play in this volume, Prometheus Bound. Taken on a stand-alone basis, this play only tells part of a much larger story and I have tried to describe some of the surrounding events based on insights provided in the introduction as well as by Edith Hamilton.

The Agony of Prometheus

“All human skill and science was Prometheus’ gift.”

Zeus took power by toppling his father, Cronus, who was the leader of the Titans. In this struggle, most of the Titans were on the side of Cronus, but Prometheus, a son of one of the Titans, sided with Zeus. Prometheus had a role in the formation of humans and was sympathetic to the plight of mankind at a time when Zeus preferred to rid the world of humans. Prometheus assisted mankind by providing great gifts of knowledge, most notably how to harness the power of fire. Prometheus also held knowledge of a secret. At some point in the future, a son of Zeus would be born who would topple his father. Prometheus knew the identity of the mother and would not tell Zeus. This was a big problem for Zeus, a notoriously promiscuous God.

Prometheus Bound opens with the god Hephaestus being commanded by Zeus to punish Prometheus. Hephaestus and Prometheus have reached a location in the Scythian wilderness considered to be the most remote place on earth. Although not without reservations about punishing Prometheus, Hephaestus is in no position to challenge Zeus. He fastens Prometheus to a “desolate peak” with chains of bronze. Prometheus is to be exposed on that peak to the punishing rays of the sun by day and freezing temperatures at night.

Each changing hour will bring successive pain to rack
Your body; and no man yet born shall set you free.
Your kindness to the human race has earned you this.
A god who would not bow to the gods' anger - you,
Transgressing right, gave privileges to mortal men.
For that you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock,
Standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest.
And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you,
All useless; for the heart of Zeus is hard to appease.

Prometheus, as an immortal, is sentenced to an eternity of suffering. Exposed on that “bitter rock”, he will find no relief. Unlike the humans he assisted, Prometheus cannot escape his punishment through death.

For bestowing gifts upon mankind
I am harnessed in this torturing clamp. For I am he
Who hunted out the source of fire, and stole it, packed
In pith of a dry fennel-stalk. And fire has proved
For men a teacher in every art, their grand resource.
That was the sin for which I now pay the full price,
Bared to the winds of heaven, bound and crucified.

Prometheus tells us that he has information that Zeus desperately wants: the identity of the son who is fated to take his power one day. This knowledge gives Prometheus a “card” to play. No amount of torture on the exposed rock will cause him to divulge the secret that Zeus simply must know. Of course, Zeus could solve his problem by abstaining from relations with all women, but anyone who understands the habits of the gods, and particularly Zeus, knows that this is hardly possible. In this play, this drama is left unresolved.

Turn your thoughts elsewhere; now is not the time to speak
Of that; it is a secret which by every means 
Must be kept close. By keeping it I shall escape
This ignominious prison and these fearful pains.

About halfway into the play, Io enters the scene. Io appeared as a frightful monster. She looked like a cow but spoke like a woman, complaining about being tormented by a gadfly. Prometheus and Io have something in common: Zeus is responsible for both of their miseries.

Zeus never allowed the bonds of his marriage to Hera stop him from keeping an eye out for attractive women. Io attracted his attention and this infatuation did not escape Hera’s notice. When Zeus was about to be caught with Io, he turned her into a cow to fool Hera. But Hera was not fooled and asked to be given the cow as a present. Zeus agreed. Hera assigned Argus, a creature with a hundred eyes, to constantly watch Io. Zeus ordered Hermes to kill Argus to free Io, but the poor cow-girl hybrid found no relief because Hera sent gadflies to constantly sting and torture her.

Io does not understand what she has done to deserve this misery.

Where, where, where
Will my endless, endless journeys bring me?
Son of Cronos [Zeus], what have I done?
What sin did you find in me,
To put me on such a yoke of torment,
Plague me to misery and madness
With this driving, stinging terror?
Burn me with fire, let the earth swallow me,
Throw me as food for sea-serpents --
Lord God, will you grudge me this prayer?
I have wandered so far,
I have been punished enough with wandering;
I cannot tell how to escape from pain.
Do you hear my voice? It is Io, the girl with horns!

Prometheus recognizes Io and they have a long discussion. Prometheus has knowledge of Io’s fate but is reluctant to tell her since he does not want to “shatter her heart” but ultimately he relents and describes the journey Io will take. The length of the journey and its difficulties leads Io to wish for death and contemplate suicide by throwing herself off the cliffs. Prometheus begins to tell a story about the possibility of Zeus being stripped of power. Although he won’t show his “cards” to Io, she has an important role to play in the story.

A descendant of Io, in the thirteenth generation after her, will free Prometheus from his chains. At the end of her long journey, Io will settle along the Nile River where Zeus will restore her as a woman and impregnate her with a son named Epaphos. Hercules will be one of the descendants and will eventually free Prometheus from his punishment. Unfortunately, this story does not bring immediate relief to Io who, stung by the gadfly again, cries out in pain and resumes her seemingly endless journey.

Hermes arrives at the scene, sent by Zeus to demand that Prometheus reveal his secret. But Prometheus will have none of it. He is immune to threats of further torture and would rather continue suffering than cave in.

You still expect to get an answer out of me?
There is no torture, no ingenuity, by which
Zeus can persuade me to reveal my secret, till
The injury of these bonds is loosed from me. Therefore
Let scorching flames be flung from heaven; let the whole earth
With white-winged snowstorms, subterranean thunderings,
Heave and convulse: nothing will force me to reveal
By whose hand Fate shall hurl Zeus from his tyranny.

Hermes, angered by such intransigence, gives Prometheus a preview of what is in store for him.

First, Zeus will split this rugged chasm with the shock
And flame of lightning, and entomb you underground
Still clamped on this embracing rock. When a long age
Has passed, you will return into the light; and then
The dark-winged hound of Zeus will come, the savage eagle,
An uninvited banqueter, and all day long
Will rip your flesh in rags and feast upon your liver, 
Gnawing it black. And you may hope for no release
From such a torment, till some god be found to take
Your pains upon him, and of his own will descend
To sunless Hades and the black depths of Tartarus.

So, be it, says Prometheus. He will not yield. Hermes calls him a lunatic for willingly accepting this type of torture. At wits end, Hermes gives a final warning and exits the scene. The play ends with Prometheus seeing the threats playing out as the rock he is chained to suddenly collapses.

Aeschylus continues the story in Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, but both of these plays are lost. Philip Vellacott writes that there is little doubt about the general course of events of the trilogy. Zeus eventually abandons his use of force against Prometheus and opens negotiations instead. Prometheus reveals that the sea nymph Thetis would give birth to the son who was fated to topple Zeus. Armed with this knowledge, Zeus abstains from relations with Thetis who eventually marries Peleus. Their son was named Achilles, of Trojan War fame. With approval from Zeus, Hercules finally sets Prometheus free.

Conclusion

Although this article does not discuss the remaining plays, The Supplicants, Seven Against Thebes, and The Persians, I very much enjoyed reading each of them.

The story of Io’s descendants continues in The Supplicants which is the first play in what is known as the Danaid Trilogy. Fifty young women have been given as brides to fifty young men who happen to be their cousins. The woman flee from Egypt to Greece to seek asylum, but this sparks a war that results in mass murder of forty-nine of the grooms, an event that takes place in the lost second play of the trilogy. Seven Against Thebes is a fragment of a story told much more fully by Sophocles, about the cursed family of Oedipus. I plan to write about Oedipus when I read Sophocles. The Persians is unique in the sense that it told a story of a recent war, one in which Aeschylus participated in. This patriotic play was clearly intended to reinforce the pride of Athenians basking in the glory of victories at Salamis and Plataea.

Although the plays presented in this book are not as satisfying as The Oresteia in the sense of providing a clear beginning, middle, and end of the plot, they are well worth the time to read. Each play can be read in a single sitting of around one hour, although two readings will greatly enhance the experience. I would suggest reading Philip Vellacott’s introduction and consulting Edith Hamilton’s Mythology while reading these plays.

I have completed my reading of all of the surviving plays of Aeschylus. I am eager to read Sophocles and Euripides in the near future but I have decided to first read the Histories of Herodotus. Like the great tragedians, Herodotus lived during the fifth century BC and his writing covers the Persian War. After reading The Persians, I realized that I lack any real knowledge of that momentous event in Greek history. It seems wise to learn more about that war as well as other aspects of Greek history as told by a man living at the time. I hope that my appreciation of Sophocles and Euripides will be enhanced by first studying Herodotus.

I now have a better understanding of how Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin came up with the name their Oppenheimer biography. The title of the book, which I reviewed last year, is American Prometheus.

Mankind’s knowledge, and perhaps our fate, was forever changed when the physics of nuclear science was discovered and formulated into weapons. I am among those who believe that nuclear weapons represent the only true existential threat to the survival of humanity on earth, and that eventual use of nuclear weapons is nearly inevitable given the fallen nature of mankind. Our only hopes are to become multi-planetary or to develop technology that neutralizes the utility of nuclear weapons and neither development is on the horizon. The Greek tragedians would no doubt create some epic dramas with this dilemma.

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As the founding fathers slowly disappeared from the scene in the early nineteenth century, a new generation of Americans began to contemplate the magnitude of what these great men had accomplished. This realization gained momentum in the decade after the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812 and put to rest many lingering issues between the United States and Great Britain. Americans began to view the Revolutionary War in a new light and the Declaration of Independence assumed qualities of scripture.

The Declaration of Independence is considered one of America’s most important state papers, so it is surprising to learn that the document was not particularly revered at the time of its creation. The Declaration had a practical purpose. America had already been at war for over a year. What was the ultimate goal of the war? Reconciliation or Revolution? After the shock of Lexington and Concord, there was a great debate throughout the colonies about whether to seek reconciliation with Great Britain or opt for divorce.

Many felt that they remained British subjects and were loyal to the King. Their goal was for the colonies to cast off the yoke of parliament and to achieve self-governance while remaining in a commonwealth with the King as head of state. The revolutionaries argued that the King himself was complicit in the objectionable acts of parliament and they demanded independence. As the first year of the war dragged on and casualties accumulated, sentiment shifted toward the revolutionaries. By the spring of 1776, there was a workable consensus and the Second Continental Congress saw the need for a document to declare independence.

In American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, Pauline Maier provides an excellent account of the conditions leading up to the drafting of the declaration, how the document was prepared by Thomas Jefferson and amended by his colleagues, and how Americans viewed the declaration at the time and in the decades that followed.

Much of what we think we know about the declaration is either incomplete or inaccurate. When Thomas Jefferson sat down to draft the declaration in June 1776, he used his formidable skills as a writer to express the sentiments of his countrymen who, in many cases, had already published declarations of independence at the state and local levels. Maier states that she bears no animus toward Jefferson, although my Jeffersonian guard went up when she disclosed that she had once nominated the great man as “the most overrated person in American history.” But my impression is that Maier was fair within the scope of her book which deals with only a small portion of Jefferson’s long life.

In the instructions Thomas Jefferson left for the inscription on his tombstone, he listed the Declaration of Independence as his most important accomplishment:

Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia

SOURCE: JEFFERSON’S GRAVESTONE

It’s remarkable to see that being President of the United States is not even mentioned! Jefferson was a man of ideas, and he clearly felt that the Declaration of Independence represented not only a key moment in American history but a crucial turning point in the history of western civilization. By the time of Jefferson’s death in 1826, his fellow citizens had begun to revere the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson was widely considered the sole author. This impression has continued to the present day.

How did a thirty-three year old junior member of the Continental Congress find himself in a position to draft such an important document? Thomas Jefferson was highly respected by 1776, but he was not yet considered one of the top political leaders of Virginia. In fact, Jefferson did not even want to be in Philadelphia in the late spring of 1776. Virginia was in the process of drafting its Constitution and the real action was in Williamsburg. Jefferson took the initiative, as he had many times in the past, to submit written drafts for Virginia’s constitution, but he was far removed in an era of very slow communications.

Jefferson was a poor public speaker, a limitation that remained with him for his entire life. This hindered his ability to exert influence in debates, but the fact that he had taken the initiative to draft many important documents had earned him a reputation as an excellent writer. So it was no surprise when Jefferson was assigned to a committee of five men who were responsible for drafting the declaration. Along with Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston served on the “committee of five.” The work of drafting the document, following the committee deliberations, was not thought to be particularly glamorous. Jefferson’s reputation as a writer and his junior status left him with this task.

Maier devotes a lengthy chapter of the book to the “other” declarations of independence that were being published in the spring of 1776, and the appendix of the book contains a few interesting examples. This examination reveals that the sentiments expressed in Jefferson’s declaration were also included in many of the “other” declarations, many of which Jefferson had clearly read. As he wrote his draft, he used some of his own prior work that was submitted as a preamble for Virginia’s constitution and he incorporated the sentiments expressed by his countrymen in other states.

While Jefferson certainly shared the revolutionary sentiments expressed in other documents and can be credited with taking on a leadership role to popularize such sentiments, I believe that his key contribution to making the Declaration of Independence into “American Scripture” was his masterful use of the English language. Generations of Americans have memorized the second paragraph of the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

While the committee and the Congress ended up editing large portions of the Declaration of Independence, only a single edit was made to the most famous passage of the document. As Maier notes, Jefferson was influenced by his own proposed preamble to the Virginia Constitution as well as George Mason’s draft Virginia Declaration of Rights. The bottom line, however, is that Jefferson’s mastery of language resulted in a document that has resonated for hundreds of years. Jefferson went on to enumerate the abuses of the King that justified the revolution, but the opening paragraphs are what we remember today.

The assertion that humans have inherent rights that are not granted by any government but emanate simply from our existence was an extremely powerful statement and remains so today. Natural rights are inalienable and no King has the right to curtail such rights. Americans would set up a government that protects such rights from tyrants by basing our system on the consent of the governed. The enumerated reasons for revolution were important in terms of making the case for revolution to the world and forming alliances, but beneath all of those enumerated grievances was the King’s violation of God given rights.

America’s original sin was clearly slavery and perhaps no founding father had as tortured a relationship with that institution than Thomas Jefferson. He included a lengthy section in his draft condemning the slave trade and blaming the King for the institution of slavery. The entire section on slavery was removed by Congress, clearly because it would have created a major controversy with states that had large slave populations. Jefferson deserves credit for trying to raise the issue in the Declaration of Independence even if his ardor for gradual emancipation cooled as he got older. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson had the idealism of youth and he clearly dreamt of an American society that, in his lifetime, would find a solution for an institution that was at odds with the lofty statements of human rights in the Declaration of Independence.

As the Declaration of Independence grew in stature as “scripture” in the early decades of the nineteenth century, John Adams grew irritated with Thomas Jefferson being credited as the sole author. Jefferson and Adams had reconciled in old age and exchanged a fascinating series of letters. Adams did not directly raise the issue with Jefferson but he did so with others. While it is understandable that Adams would feel slighted, this is a good example of how taking initiative can yield impressive long-term results. The Declaration of Independence was not the first time that Thomas Jefferson wielded his formidable pen to make history.

By taking on a task that others on the committee were content to delegate to a junior member, Jefferson secured his place in the history books. Pauline Maier’s book is an important contribution for those of us who want to “get into the weeds” of how the Declaration of Independence was created, but such readers will always be a small minority.

Thomas Jefferson’s stature in America has taken an unfair hit in recent years as “woke” and politically correct virtue signalers insist on retroactively applying twenty-first century standards to a man who died in 1826. But I suspect that when America celebrates its 250th birthday in 2026, Jefferson will be credited as the author of the Declaration of Independence without any caveats.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, half a century after their great collaboration. The Declaration of Independence certainly qualifies as “American Scripture.”

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The Oresteia is comprised of three tragic plays produced by Aeschylus in 458 BC. The trilogy is an undisputed classic that has captivated audiences and readers for twenty-five centuries. Aeschylus assumed a certain level of familiarity with the Greek gods and mythology and this could be taken for granted in a society immersed in these characters since childhood. His plays were produced for a wide audience, not for elite scholars. But as the centuries passed, fewer people retained knowledge of ancient mythology.

Christianity displaced the Greek gods, first slowly and then with tremendous momentum. Today, few people outside of academia have the in-depth understanding of Greek mythology required to appreciate and enjoy The Oresteia. This is unfortunate because Aeschylus not only tells a captivating tale but has a broader message about the evolution of human society from atrocious acts of barbarism to what we call civilization.

Most readers who pick up a copy of The Oresteia with no previous exposure to Greek mythology will find the experience frustrating. At a minimum, I would recommend reading The Iliad and The Odyssey prior to reading Aeschylus. Most readers would also benefit greatly by reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and consulting this book as a useful reference when approaching the classics. Even after studying these books in great detail, I found aspects of The Oresteia difficult to understand. Fortunately, the translation I read by Robert Fagles includes an excellent introduction as well as comprehensive notes that can be consulted while reading the plays. Even with these useful notes, multiple readings were required before I felt like I really understood what Aeschylus was trying to convey.

In this article, I provide a brief backstory of the characters involved in The Oresteia followed by thoughts on each of the plays in the trilogy. There is no practical way to write about this without including “spoilers” so readers who prefer to read the plays first should do so before reading this article. However, in this case, I think that most readers would benefit from knowing the backstory and the plot before reading the plays.

The Backstory

The House of Atreus was hopelessly cursed. To understand the curse, we need to start at the beginning. Tantalus was one of the many mortal sons of Zeus. He was highly favored by the gods who allowed him to ascend to Mount Olympus to dine in their divine presence, a privilege bestowed on few mortals.

As told by Edith Hamilton in Mythology, Tantalus reciprocated by inviting the gods to a banquet. Attempting to test whether the gods were omniscient, Tantalus killed his son, Pelops, and boiled him in a cauldron. This sacrifice was served to the gods who recoiled in horror when they realized what they were being served. Tantalus was punished for eternity, placed in a pool of water in Hades beneath a fruit tree. Whenever he reached for fruit, it pulled away from him and whenever he tried to drink the water, it receded.

Pelops was miraculously bought back to life and went on to live an honorable life, but the curse of Tantalus skipped just one generation. Pelops had several children. The most prominent of his children were Atreus and Thyestes but these sons did not live honorable lives. Thyestes had an affair with his brother’s wife. When Atreus found out, he secretly killed two of his brother’s children and prepared a feast to be served to Thyestes who proceeded to dine on his own children. When Thyestes found out, he threw up in horror but he was unable to do anything about it since Atreus held insurmountable power as King.

Atreus went on to have children, and the most famous of his offspring were Agamemnon and Menelaus, two of the characters brought to life in Homer’s Iliad. Agamemnon and Menelaus married two sisters —Clytemnestra and Helen. Helen was abducted by Paris, a Trojan Prince, which launched the decade-long Trojan War led by Agamemnon. On their way to war, Agamemnon offended the goddess Artemis by killing a sacred deer. Artemis prevented the Greek fleet from reaching Troy until Agamemnon agreed to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to placate the goddess. This understandably infuriated Clytemnestra who proceeded to spend a decade in her palace ruminating on the murder of her daughter while Agamemnon was at war.

Thyestes had a son named Aegisthus who was either born after the cannibalistic feast or somehow escaped being killed. Aegisthus might have been the product of an incestuous relationship between Thyestes and his own daughter. While Agamemnon was at Troy, Aegisthus seduced Clytemnestra and effectively took control of Agamemnon’s kingdom. Although this usurpation was well known by the people, Agamemnon was curiously ignorant about his wife’s adultery and the loss of his power until he returned from Troy in triumph. This is the point at which Aeschylus begins Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy.

Agamemnon

A night watchman on the highest roof of the house of Atreus waged a perennial battle to stay awake despite enduring ceaseless boredom. His job was to monitor the horizon for a signal-fire communicating that Troy had finally fallen to the Greeks. When Troy was pillaged, great fires were burned in succession on the tallest mountains across hundreds of miles. In this way, primitive communications were possible thousands of years before the telegraph. The watchman finally sees light emerge very slowly to the east and realizes that it is a signal announcing the end of the Trojan War.

The watchman is elated. He begins to dance and cannot wait to inform Clytemnestra.

There's your signal clear and true, my queen!
Rise up from bed - hurry, lift a cry of triumph
through the house, praise the gods for the beacon,
if they've taken Troy ...
                          But there it burns, 
fire all the way. I'm for the morning dances.
Master's luck is mine. A throw of the torch 
has brought us triple-sixes - we have won!

Meanwhile, a group of old men have assembled around a nearby alter used to offer sacrifices to the gods. These men form a chorus, one of the devices Aeschylus uses to tell his story. These men were too old to fight at Troy, and they bemoaned their lack of usefulness in combat.

We are the old, dishonored ones,
the broken husks of men.
Even then they cast us off,
the rescue mission left us here 
to prop a child's strength upon a stick.
What if the new sap rises in his chest?
He has no soldiery in him,
  no more than we,
and we are aged past aging,
gloss of the leaf shriveled,
three legs at a time we falter on.
Old men are children once again,
  a dream that sways and wavers
into the hard light of day.

These men are aware of the history of the house of Atreus as well as Clytemnestra’s adultery, and they are quite clearly loyal to Agamemnon. One of the oddities of the play is that no one seems to have warned Agamemnon about the obvious danger to his life as he approaches his home. Agamemnon is blissfully unaware of this mortal peril as he makes his way through the countryside, blessed by the gods with smooth travel from Troy.

Clytemnestra puts on a show for the old men, and perhaps for herself, by preparing an elaborate ritual and offering sacrifices to the gods. She ignores the old men’s inquiries and the reader might imagine that she is plotting her husband’s demise as she prays. It is tempting to view Clytemnestra as a villain. After all, she is an adulteress and plans to kill her husband. However, part of the tragedy is that in her mind she is not a murderer but an executioner, exacting justified retribution for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter.

While Clytemnestra goes about her rituals, the old men tell the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia.

'My father, father!' - she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
    on with a prayer,
         'Hoist her over the altar
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting - lift her,
    sweep her robes around her,
  but slip this strap in her gentile curving lips ...
       here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house'

Agamemnon faced what he regarded as an impossible choice, at least by the prevailing moral standards of the ancient world. Either satisfy Artemis with the blood of Iphigenia, betraying his own daughter, or betray the forces he led as commander in chief of the Greeks. Failure to satisfy Artemis would doom the Greek fleet and give victory to the Trojans by default. Agamemnon chooses to sacrifice his daughter, perhaps fated by the curse on the house of Atreus that originated with the sins of Tantalus.

Clytemnestra finally speaks to the old men of the chorus, informing them that the signal fire meant that Troy had fallen. The old men seem to find it hard to believe and Clytemnestra feels like she is being mocked. One gets the sense that the old men dislike the queen, no doubt because of her disloyalty to Agamemnon, although they fail to connect the dots and realize that she is plotting murder. Clytemnestra makes a memorable speech about how the signal fires rushed from mountaintop to mountaintop to speed news of the victory, making sure to refer to Agamemnon in glowing terms as “her lord” and pretending to be excited about his impending return. Well, she might indeed have been excited, but not for honorable reasons!

Clytemnestra, having finished with her rituals, goes inside the palace and the old men continue, at times lamenting the high price of war in verse that echoes through the ages.

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.

War, War, the great gold-broker of corpses
holds the balance of the battle on his spear!
Home from the pyres he sends them,
 home from Troy to the loved one,
heavy with tears, the urns brimmed full,
 the heroes return in gold-dust,
dear, light ask for men; ad they weep,
they praise them, 'He had skill in the swordplay,'
     'He went down so tall in the onslaught,'
'All for another's woman.' So they mutter
in secret and the rancor steals
towards our staunch defenders, Atreus' sons.

A herald arrives to confirm of the fall of Troy and the approach of the King. Part of the herald’s speech might apply to war in any age. Parts of this moving passage made me think of E.B. Sledge’s account of his service during World War II in the Pacific. It is remarkable how the miseries of war can reach across the centuries resulting in passages that could apply equally to the Trojan War and the Second World War.

A long, hard pull we had, if I would tell it all.
The iron rations, penned in the gangways
hock by jowl like sheep. Whatever miseries
break a man, our quota, every sun-starved day.

Then on the beaches it was worse. Dug in
under the enemy ramparts - deadly going.
Out of the sky, out of the marshy flats
the dews soaked us, turned the ruts we fought from
into gullied, made our gear, our scalps
crawl with lice.
                And talk of the cold,
the sleet to freeze the gulls, and the big snows
come avalanching down from Ida. Oh but the heat,
the sea and the windless noons, the swells asleep,
dropped to a dead calm ...

Clytemnestra returns with an entourage pretending to be joyful about the impending return of Agamemnon. How to best welcome her lord, she asks? Of course, we know that the plan is really how to murder Agamemnon, but Clytemnestra can hardly murder him openly. By pretending to be excited about his return, she hopes to lull him into complacency.

Agamemnon’s actions in The Iliad reveal a powerful man who is utterly clueless about the effect of his actions on other people. Agamemnon caused enormous damage to the Greek cause when he alienated Achilles by stealing Briseis, a woman who Achilles had abducted during a raid on a nearby city. Similarly, Agamemnon does not seem to realize that showing up with another woman might irritate his wife. Agamemnon enslaved Cassandra, one of King Priam’s daughters, as his personal concubine after the fall of Troy. Perhaps riding into his palace with his concubine was not the best move when greeting a wife who might have still been irritated about the sacrifice of Iphigenia?

Clytemnestra refuses to take the bait and bides her time, claiming eternal love for her husband and bemoaning her loneliness over the past decade. The old men and the audience are fully aware that Clytemnestra was hardly lonely and had been carrying on an affair with Aegisthus, but Agamemnon is utterly clueless. She literally spreads out the “red carpet” for her husband, only the carpet was really a tapestry considered sacred to the gods. Walking on it would be a form of blasphemy, which is obviously the point. Clytemnestra tells Agamemnon that he deserves to walk on the tapestries.

               Come to me now, my dearest,
down from the car of war, but never set the foot
that stamped out Troy on earth again, my great one.

Women, why delay? You have your orders.
Pave his way with tapestries.

Agamemnon protests that no man should walk on the tapestries but he eventually gives in and enters the palace, albeit after taking off his boots to avoid soiling the sacred tapestries. Agamemnon walks over the threshold of the castle, never to be seen again alive.

Clytemnestra returns from the palace to encourage Cassandra to join them inside, promising to share with her the “victory libations” they are enjoying. Cassandra remains silent. Clytemnestra assumes that there is a language barrier and angrily returns to the palace. With a scream, Cassandra cries out to Apollo in a desperate attempt to save her life. Endowed with the gift of prophesy, Cassandra can see Agamemnon’s fate before her as well as her own impending death.

In a haunting dialogue, Cassandra tells the old men about what is about to happen, connecting these events with the feast of Thyestes and the curse on the house of Atreus. She seems to babble on and on, with the old men at a loss to interpret her ramblings. Soon, she directly tells them that Clytemnestra would murder Agamemnon, although the old men can hardly believe it. Staggering toward the palace and her inevitable fate, Cassandra foresees retribution for their deaths.

                   We will die,
but not without some honor from the gods.
There will come another to avenge us,
born to kill his mother, born
his father's champion. A wanderer, a fugitive
driven off his native land, he will come home
to cope the stones of hate that menace all he loves.
The gods have sworn a monumental oath: as his father lies
upon the ground he draws him home with power like a prayer.

Cassandra enters the palace and there is a scream! Agamemnon shouts that he has been struck deep, calling it the death blow. He is struck again and then there is silence. The old men try to organize themselves to break into the palace but scatter in fear. Soon, the palace door opens and Clytemnestra is standing over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. The truth is finally revealed. Clytemnestra had wrapped Agamemnon in royal robes and then struck him with a sword. The commander in chief of the Greeks who had slain so many on the plains of Troy was struck down, defenseless, by his own wife.

Far from expressing regrets, Clytemnestra glories in her gruesome deed.

So he goes down, and the life is bursting out of him -
great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower 
wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel 
like the Earth when the spring rains come down,
the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear
splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!

The old men are horrified and appalled, and are not shy about saying so. Clytemnestra justifies her actions based on retribution for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, claiming that there was a double standard at work. No one condemned Agamemnon for killing Iphigenia, yet Clytemnestra was being condemned for what she sees as delivering justice. Why should Clytemnestra be banished and cast into exile, as the old men threaten, when Agamemnon’s actions were never even questioned?

Clytemnestra might have a point regarding double standards, but the old men are not buying it. They bemoan the death of Agamemnon, a “god like man” who they consider a hero and the fact that he will not even receive a proper burial. The old men are ultimately powerless to do anything. Aegisthus arrives and his dialogue with the men soon escalates to the point of imminent violence, but Clytemnestra puts a stop to it. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra walk into the palace and the first play of the trilogy ends.

The Libation Bearers

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son named Orestes who was still a child when Agamemnon returned from Troy. At that time, Orestes was in hiding in a neighboring city because his older sister, Electra, suspected that Orestes might be murdered and sent him into exile. The sole male heir of Agamemnon was an obvious threat to the continued rule of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in the long run. Several years pass and Orestes returns home as a young man around twenty years of age accompanied by his friend, Pylades.

Orestes arrives at his father’s grave to pray and cuts two locks of his hair to place on the grave. Soon, a group of women arrive in a procession led by Electra. Orestes and Pylades have no idea who these women are so they hide behind the tomb. The group of women, acting as the chorus, have come to offer libations at Agamemnon’s tomb. Clytemnestra has been besieged by nightmares and apparently believes that making offerings at the grave will help give her peace of mind.

Aie! - bristling Terror struck -
  the seer of the house,
the nightmare ringing clear
            breathed its wrath in sleep,
in the midnight watch a cry! - the voice of Terror
deep in the house, bursting down 
on the women's darkened chambers, yes,
and the old ones, skilled at dreams, swore oaths to god and called,
     
    'The proud dead stir under the earth,
they rage against the ones who took their lives.'

  But the gifts, the empty gifts
        the hopes will ward them off - 
good Mother Earth! - that godless woman sends me here ...
      I dread to say her prayer.

The servants suffer no illusion that Clytemnestra’s offering will actually “redeem the blood that wets the soil” but they offer the libations as instructed. Electra has accompanied the servants and it becomes immediately obvious that she takes the side of Agamemnon and loathes her mother. She encourages the slaves not to hide their true feelings. All seem to revere Agamemnon’s memory and sincerely make their offerings. Electra prays for the return of Orestes who is the only one who might bring retribution.

                              I go like a slave,
and Orestes driven from his estates while they,
they roll in the fruits of all your labors,
magnificent and sleek. O bring Orestes home,
with a happy twist of fate, my father. Hear me,
make me far more self-possessed than mother,
make this hand more pure.

These prayers for us. For our enemies I say,
Raise up your avenger, into the light, my father - 
kill the killers in return, with justice!
So in the midst of prayers for good I place 
this curse for them.

It seems a bit odd that Electra has taken Agamemnon’s side with absolutely no reservations. After all, Electra’s sister was killed by Agamemnon in a sacrifice. Under different circumstances, the sacrifice might have been Electra herself, yet she is curiously unsympathetic to her mother’s point of view which required retribution against Agamemnon. This oddity is never explained.

Electra notices the locks of hair on the tomb and, after examination, finds that they are indistinguishable from her own hair. Similarly, the footprints nearby are nearly the same as hers, in terms of shape if not size. Of course, this is because these clues were left by her brother. Orestes pops up from behind the tomb. Like Odysseus, he likes to tell tall tales and initially spins a false story but quickly admits who he is. It seems like Cassandra’s prediction that Agamemnon’s son will win retribution is about to come true. The god Apollo has even encouraged Orestes to avenge Agamemnon’s death by killing Clytemnestra.

But, of course, Orestes cannot avenge his father without killing his own mother and this is another layer of tragedy. His duty is to make the killer of his father pay, but he cannot do this without committing the sin of matricide. Orestes wishes that there was some way out of this dilemma, but there is none. It Agamemnon had only died an honorable death on the plains of Troy, Orestes would have been spared his dilemma.

  If only at Troy
a Lycian cut you down, my father - 
gone, with an aura left at home behind you,
     children to go their ways
and the eyes look on them bright with awe,
and the tomb you win on headlands seas away
  would buoy up the house ...

But Agamemnon died an embarrassing death and this cannot stand. Orestes and Electra come up with a plan. Orestes and Pylades will approach the palace disguised as travelers and seek the customary hospitality extended to strangers. They will claim to bring news about Orestes, ensuring that Clytemnestra will give them an audience. The hope is that this will give Orestes an opening to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

As expected, Clytemnestra orders her servants to provide the travelers with all of the comforts available in the palace. This notion of hospitality in Ancient Greece is quite interesting and repeated again and again in the literature of the period.

                      Strangers, please,
tell me what you would like and it is yours.
We've all you might expect in a house like ours.
We have warm baths and beds to charm away your pains
and the eyes of Justice look on all we do.
But if you come for higher things, affairs 
that touch the state, that is the men's concern 
and I will stir them on.

Orestes spins a tall tale and tells Clytemnestra that her son is dead! Clytemnestra is shocked and mourns the supposed death of Orestes. She welcomes the strangers into the halls of the palace and goes off to inform others about the sad fate of her only son.

Meanwhile, the servants who had poured libations on the grave of Agamemnon form a chorus and Cilissa, Orestes’ old nurse from childhood appears, distraught by the news of his death. Naturally, she is grief stricken by the news of the death of a child who she raised from birth.

Red from your mother's womb I took you, reared you ...
nights, the endless nights I paced, your wailing
kept me moving - led me a life of labour, 
all for what?

...

                          and so I nursed Orestes,
yes, from his father's arms I took him once,
and now they say he's dead,
I've suffered it all, and now I'll fetch that man,
the ruination of the house - give him the news,
he'll relish every word.

Cilissa is referring to Aegisthus, her new master and a man she clearly despises. The leader of the chorus urges Cilissa to have Aegisthus come alone, without his typical entourage of bodyguards. Aegisthus shows up and pretends to be distressed by the news. The chorus tells Aegisthus to go inside the palace to learn more from the strangers who brought the news of Orestes’ death. Aegisthus walks into the palace, alone, to his death. A scream is soon heard and a servant emerges to tell the chorus that Aegisthus has been killed.

The palace doors open with Orestes standing over the body of Aegisthus with a sword in his hand. Clytemnestra immediately realizes what has happened and recognizes her son, initially begging for her life. Orestes hesitates and asks Pylades for advice. In his only lines of the play, Pylades tells Orestes that he has no choice. After all, Apollo has justified retribution and it is better to make enemies of mankind than to go against the gods. Orestes and Clytemnestra exchange words and finally Orestes drags her into the palace and the doors close. The chorus sings while Orestes kills his mother and the doors open with Orestes standing over the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

Behold the double tyranny of our land!
They killed my father, stormed my fathers' house.
They had their power when they held the throne.
Great lovers still, as you may read their fate.
True to their oath, hand in hand they swore
to kill my father, hand in hand to die.
Now they keep their word.

But the chorus senses that the story is not over.

No man can go through life
and reach the end unharmed.
  Aye, trouble is now,
and trouble still to come.

Orestes feels justified in his actions.

I say to my friends in public: I killed my mother,
not with a little justice. She was stained
with father's murder, she was cursed by god.
And the magic spells that fired up my daring?
One comes first. The Seer of Delphi who declared,
'Go through with this and you go free of guilt.
Fail and - '

            I can't repeat the punishment.
What bow could hit the crest of so much pain?

Alas, Orestes is nowhere near being free from pain. He has a vision, seen by no one other than himself, of monstrous looking figures approaching. They are gorgons, women who are shrouded in black with hair of swarming serpents. Orestes has seen the first of the Furies, goddesses who pursue and punish murderers. The chorus advises Orestes to seek Apollo’s help. The god might have the power to set Orestes free from the torments of the Furies. The play ends with Orestes running away in utter terror.

The Eumenides

Orestes found himself in an impossible situation. Apollo sanctioned the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as retribution for the murder of Agamemnon, but the Furies did not see it in the same way. The Furies took the side of Clytemnestra and considered matricide, no matter the circumstances or the approval of other gods, to be a grave sin. From a psychological perspective, a modern reader might prefer to view the Furies as subconscious guilt. Orestes basked in the glory of retribution initially but some part of him understood that retribution came at the cost of committing another sin. When it comes to retributive justice, dispensed by those directly offended, where does the cycle of violence and death stop?

The question of whether there is a better way to deal with crime is the subject of The Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy. Can humanity rise above retribution driven by rage and embrace the rule of law? The dawn of civilization might well be marked by the ability of a society to oversee punishments for crimes with a semblance of objectivity and due process rather than the endless violence of retribution.

Plagued by the Furies, Orestes has fled to Delphi to seek solace at the temple of Apollo. Orestes kneels in prayer at the Navelstone inside the temple surrounded by the Furies. Apollo pledges to never fail Orestes and has made the Furies fall asleep, bringing temporary relief. However, Apollo is powerless to provide permanent relief from the Furies.

Deep in the endless heartland they will drive you,
striding horizons, feet pounding the earth for ever,
on, on over seas and cities swept by tides!
Never surrender, never brood on the labour.
And once you reach the citadel of Pallas, kneel 
and embrace her ancient idol in your arms and there,
with judges of your case, with a magic spell -
with words - we will devise the master-stroke 
that sets you free from torment once and for all.
I persuaded you to take your mother's life.

Permanent relief is only possible if Orestes seeks justice from Athena who Apollo hopes will fairly judge the case. Apollo asks Hermes to guide Orestes to Athens where his case will be heard. When Orestes leaves the temple, the ghost of Clytemnestra wakes up the Furies and urges them to continue hounding her son in retribution for her murder. Whatever motherly instincts she might have once had have evaporated.

Up! don't yield to the labour, limp with sleep.
Never forget my anguish.
Let my charges hurt you, they are just;
deep in the righteous heart they prod like spurs.

You, blast him on with your gory breath,
the fire of your vitals - wither him, after him,
one last foray - waste him, burn him out!

The Furies awaken and are enraged that Orestes has escaped from their grasp. Apollo returns to the temple and has a nasty exchange with the Furies, ultimately throwing them out. The Furies respond by reminding Apollo of his guilt in urging Orestes to murder his mother, and Apollo retorts that the Furies sanctioned Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband. The Furies and Apollo will never see eye to eye, despite their shared status as immortal gods. The Furies rush out of the temple to travel to Athens in time for the trial.

At the Acropolis in Athens, Orestes throws himself at the mercy of Athena’s idol, wrapping himself around it in supplication. When the Furies catch up to him, they go on a verbal rampage.

                       - There he is!
Clutching the knees of power once again,
 twined in the deathless goddess' idol, look,
he wants to go on trial for his crimes.
                                      - Never ...
   the mother's blood that wets the ground,
  you can never bring it back, dear god,
the Earth drinks, and the running life is gone.
                                              - No,
you'll give me blood for blood, you must!
       Out of your living marrow I will drain
 my red libation, our of your veins I suck my food,
         my raw, brutal cups -
                              - Wither you alive,
     drag you down and there you pay, agony 
for mother-killing agony!

Orestes again appeals to Athena and then prays silently while the Furies dance around him demanding vengeance, reaching toward him, haunting him, and promising ever-lasting damnation.

Finally, Athena enters after arriving from Troy where she just finished seeing the Greeks take the city. This is a somewhat odd chronological detail given that the Trojan War must have ended several years before, but perhaps Aeschylus is aiming for a symbolic effect. Athena asks to be brought up to speed on the controversy and effectively sits in judgment, allowing the Furies to present their case first. Orestes responds by denying that he has come in need of purging, feeling fully justified in taking vengeance in honor of his father.

                What an ignoble death he died
when he came home - Ai! my blackhearted mother 
cut him down, enveloped him in her handsome net - 
it still attests his murder in the bath.
But I came back, my years of exile weathered - 
killed the one who bore me, I won't deny it,
killed her in revenge. I loved my father,
fiercely.

After noting that Apollo spurred him on and should share responsibility, Orestes tells Athena that his fate is in her hands and he will accept her verdict.

Athena finds the matter too grave to decide on her own. She sees both sides of the case and understands that there might be a crisis regardless of how she rules. To give the decision more legitimacy, Athena decides to appoint a tribunal of judges to settle the matter. Ten of the finest men of Athens are to be selected to sit in judgment of Orestes. With the sound of trumpets, the trial begins.

Athena stands between the Furies and Orestes, much as a judge would separate the plaintiff and defendant in a courtroom. Apollo confirms that Orestes acted on his behalf and accepts his share of the responsibility for the murder of Clytemnestra. Orestes does not deny that he killed him mother and repeats that he has no regrets. The Furies see no justification for matricide, apparently under any circumstances and certainly not for purposes of retribution. Apollo does not really see Clytemnestra as a mother, but more as a vessel carrying the seed of Agamemnon.

Here is the truth, I tell you - see how right I am.
The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just the nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life - the one who mounts.
She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps
the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.
I give you proof that all I say is true.
The father can father forth without a mother.

In Greek mythology, Athena herself was supposedly produced without the need for a mother, springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Apollo presents the example of Athena as proof that a mother is basically irrelevant. It follows that Orestes owed his loyalty to the source of his life, Agamemnon, and had no commensurate duty toward Clytemnestra.

Without further comment, Athena gives the jury instructions and urges them to decide the case fairly. There are ten men in the jury. Before the votes are counted, Athena announces that in the event of a tie, she will decide the matter by casting a tie-breaking vote in favor of Orestes. The vote does turn out to be tied, so Athena’s opinion prevails. It is not clear why Athena did not pick a jury with an odd number of members to prevent a tie from happening in the first place. Unlike modern murder trials in the United States, unanimity was not required for conviction, only a majority of the votes.

Acquitted of the charges against him, Orestes thanks Athena and takes his leave.

The Furies are … furious at Athena. They are beside themselves with grief over the loss of their authority and they view the verdict as unjust. Athena urges the Furies to defer to her judgment and to not view the result as a defeat since it was arrived at through a fair process.

                        Yield to me.
No more heavy spirits. You were not defeated -
the vote was tied, a verdict fairly reached
with no disgrace to you, no Zeus brought
luminous proof before us. He who spoke
god's oracle, he bore witness that Orestes
did the work but should not suffer harm.

And now you'd vent your anger, hurt the land?
Consider a moment. Calm yourself. Never 
render us barren, raining your potent showers
down like spears, consuming every seed.
By all my rights I promise you your seat
in the depths of the earth, yours by all rights - 
stations at hearths equipped with glistening thrones,
covered with praise! My people will revere you.

The Furies still feel disgraced and feel that their ancient powers are being stripped away unfairly. Athena urges them to see the dawning of civilization as an antidote for perennial strife and civil war. Rather than retributive justice, dispensed by the aggrieved in a never-ending cycle of violence, Athens will now be ruled by due process with judgment and punishment dispensed through the rule of law.

It takes some extended persuasion, but the Furies eventually come to embrace Athena’s vision.

                 And the brutal strife,
          the civil war devouring men, I pray
        that it never rages through our city, no
that the good Greek soil never drinks the blood of Greeks,
       shed in an orgy of reprisal life for life -
           that Fury like a beast will never 
               rampage through the land.
              Give joy in return for joy,
               one common will for love,
            and hate with one strong heart:
       such a union heals a thousand ills of man.

The Furies have turned their rage into something more constructive. They have been converted from seekers of bloody revenge to the defenders of justice and protectors of Athenian civilization. Thereafter, they came to be known as The Eumenides, translated as “The Kindly Ones.”

Conclusion

The Oresteia was initially very difficult to understand and required several readings plus close study of the introduction and the end notes before I felt comfortable writing about it. Part of the challenge is simply understanding the role of the gods in Greek society. Reading Edith Hamilton’s books, particularly Mythology, was enormously helpful and the fact that I recently read and wrote about The Iliad and The Odyssey was also important preparation.

While immersion in Greek Mythology is a prerequisite for any meaningful understanding of Aeschylus, I also think that it takes considerable time and effort to get used to reading plays. The role of the chorus is not immediately obvious, but plays a crucial role in each play of the trilogy. It is useful to picture the actors on stage as one reads the plays. Many modern readers have no exposure to plays as a literary form and I was no exception. Now that I have read this trilogy, I hope to have an easier time reading other ancient plays.

Perhaps the most formidable roadblock is that I have a hard time relating to polytheism, particularly the concept of multiple competing gods with highly suspect moral compasses. I am the product of a civilization heavily influenced by the Bible. The God of the Old and New Testaments is nothing like the gods of Ancient Greece. The presumption of a single God, omniscient, all-powerful, benevolent, and just, permeates our civilization and makes the polytheism of Ancient Greece seem utterly bizarre and foreign.

Aeschylus wrote over seventy plays during his lifetime and only seven survive. In my opinion, it is worth the time and effort to understand the message he was attempting to convey. I plan to read his other plays — Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians — next month and will most likely write articles about each of them.

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Child mortality took a heavy toll and it was routine for parents to experience the loss of many children. Women routinely died due to problems related to childbirth. Thomas Jefferson, like many of his peers, experienced devastating losses. When Jefferson began courting Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow, he was prepared to adopt her son, John Skelton, but he died before reaching five years of age. Jefferson had six children with Martha, but only two of his daughters survived to adulthood and only one daughter survived him. Martha died months after giving birth for the final time due to injuries sustained in childbirth.

Virginia did not have a system of public education in colonial times which meant that only children of the wealthy had meaningful opportunities to improve their minds. Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in the political debate over expanding the narrow base of education to ensure that citizens would be equipped to handle the responsibilities of self-government. His proposals for public education included girls as well as boys, and he had enlightened views by the standards of the times.1 However, he did not view education for his daughters as preparation for taking on public roles.2 Lacking a surviving son, Jefferson devoted much effort to the education of Peter Carr, one of his favorite nephews.

Peter Carr was the son of Thomas Jefferson’s sister and Dabney Carr, one of Jefferson’s closest friends.

Dabney Carr died in 1773 at the age of 29 when Peter was only three years old. Jefferson stepped in as a father figure for Peter. By 1782, Jefferson’s sister and her six children were living at Monticello and Jefferson had taken a special interest in Peter’s education:

“For upwards of a year, he had been teaching the eldest, who came nearer being his son than any other surviving person, and he had been able to give him more attention lately. Peter Carr was reading Virgil and about to start French. Two other boys were coming along, and all of them were ‘very hopeful geniuses,’ he [TJ] said. They must not be abandoned to nature. Also, there were three girls who were now regarded as marriageable and were approaching an expensive period. He really had nine children, all told, and he believed that he owed them a great deal of time and attention.”

JEFFERSON THE VIRGINIAN, P. 393

Jefferson poured even more efforts into the education of Peter and the other children after the death of his wife in 1782, but he was soon called upon to resume public service. In June 1783, Jefferson was elected as one of Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress which took him away from Monticello, and on July 5, 1784, Jefferson sailed to Europe to begin five years of service as Minister to France. Jefferson was accompanied by Martha, his oldest daughter and had to make arrangements for the continued care and education of the other children.

While in France, Jefferson wrote at least two letters to Peter Carr instructing him on various aspects of his education. These letters are quite interesting given the ambitious course of study that was expected of Peter who was just fifteen years old when he received Jefferson’s first letter in the late summer of 1785. Jefferson’s advice is remarkable in terms of the lofty expectations he set for the young man. Apparently, Peter had lost quite a bit of time for unspecified reasons, and Jefferson urges him to waste no more time if he aspires to rise to a position commensurate with his distinguished lineage.

“I am much mortified to hear that you have lost so much time, and that when you arrived in Williamsburgh you were not at all advanced from what you were when you left Monticello. Time now begins to be precious to you. Every day you lose, will retard a day your entrance on that public stage whereon you may begin to be useful to yourself. However the way to repair the loss is to improve the future time. I trust that with your dispositions even the acquisition of science is a pleasing employment. I can assure you that the possession of it is what (next to an honest heart) will above all things render you dear to your friends, and give you fame and promotion in your own country.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

While possession of knowledge will be essential for Peter to live up to his potential, the most important thing is to act with integrity and honor, which must be the first priority. Honorable conduct is important even when no one else is looking.

“Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any possible situation or under any circumstances that it is best for you to do a dishonourable thing however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing tho’ it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

In times of trouble, Peter is urged to avoid trying to extricate himself through dishonorable means. While acting with integrity might not seem to be a path toward a solution, Jefferson instructs Peter to trust that doing what is right will eventually lead to a solution.

“If ever you find yourself environed with difficulties and perplexing circumstances, out of which you are at a loss how to extricate yourself, do what is right, and be assured that that will extricate you the best out of the worst situations. Tho’ you cannot see when you fetch one step, what will be the next, yet follow truth, justice, and plain-dealing, and never fear their leading you out of the labyrinth in the easiest manner possible. The knot which you thought a Gordian one will untie itself before you.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

Honesty is the best policy because telling one lie makes it easier to tell the next one. Soon enough, the liar can’t tell truth from fiction.

“It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

With instruction on moral and ethical conduct completed, Jefferson turns to Peter’s education. It should be no surprise that Jefferson urges Peter to read what we now refer to as The Great Books. The course of study he proposes would be rigorous for anyone and might have seemed overwhelming for a fifteen year old, especially because Jefferson advocates reading in Ancient Greek and Latin rather than translations. However, this is how Jefferson himself was educated and it was expected that the leaders of Virginia would read widely from primary sources in a variety of disciplines.

“For the present I advise you to begin a course of ancient history, reading everything in the original and not in translations. First read Goldsmith’s history of Greece. This will give you a digested view of that field. Then take up ancient history in the detail, reading the following books in the following order. Herodotus. Thucydides. Xenophontis hellenica. Xenophontis Anabasis. Quintus Curtius. Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next will be of Roman history. From that we will come down to Modern history. In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer. Read also Milton’s paradise lost, Ossian, Pope’s works, Swift’s works in order to form your style in your own language. In morality read Epictetus, Xenophontis memorabilia, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Cicero’s philosophies.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

Books were expensive and unavailable in Virginia at the time, so Jefferson ordered several books from London to be shipped to Peter.

“I have ordered the following books to be sent to you from London to the care of Mr. Madison. Herodotus. Thucydides. Xenophon’s Hellenics, Anabasis, and Memorabilia. Cicero’s works. Baretti’s Spanish and English dictionary. Martin’s philosophical grammar and Martin’s philosophia Britannica. I will send you the following from hence. Bezout’s mathematics. De la Lande’s astronomy. Muschenbroek’s physics. Quintus Curtius. Justin, a Spanish grammar, and some Spanish books.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

Today, it would seem impossible for a teenager to pursue such a course of study and have any remaining time available for sports or exercise. But in Jefferson’s world, there were far fewer distractions and, obviously, no electronics. As a result, it might have been possible for Peter to pursue Jefferson’s recommendation to devote at least two hours per day to exercise. He particularly recommended walking and wrote that Peter should not take books with him. Peter is told to walk wherever he can rather than relying on horses.

“Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

Jefferson was an advocate of a fixed and regular routine, waking early in the morning and going to bed early rather than staying up late. Those who habitually stay up late injure their health and impede their mind. Although Jefferson would remain in France for the rest of Peter’s childhood, he asks for regular updates after giving further advice on how Peter should structure his days:

“Having ascribed proper hours to exercise, divide what remain (I mean of your vacant hours) into three portions. Give the principal to history, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry. Write me once every month or two and let me know the progress you make. Tell me in what manner you employ every hour in the day.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 19, 1785

Fast forward two years.

In the late summer of 1787, Peter was seventeen years old and was beginning a course of study under George Wythe. Jefferson had studied law under Wythe’s supervision from 1762 to 1767 and Peter was following in his footsteps. Jefferson was thrilled and wrote that Peter would find this education to be “one of the most fortunate events of your life, as I have ever been sensible it was of mine.”

Jefferson enclosed another reading list and offered to send Peter any books that were not already in Dabney Carr’s library. Jefferson urges Peter to prioritize great attention to learning Spanish in addition to French, which was of course assumed. We can already see that Jefferson anticipated closer relations with Spain in the decades to come and understood that Spanish was the language of much of the Americas. While Italian is a “delightful language”, Jefferson fears that learning it would be a distraction for Peter.

Moral philosophy is a subject that Jefferson considers important at this stage of Peter’s education.

“The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 10, 1787

Jefferson believed that Peter was now mature enough to consider the question of religion. Later in his political career, Jefferson was accused of being an atheist, but this was not the case. Jefferson, however, did advocate examining religion using human reason and applying the same rigor to questions of religion as to any other subject.

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first the religion of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 10, 1787

When the Bible includes information consistent with “the ordinary course of nature”, the credibility of the Bible should be judged in the same way as any other writing according to Jefferson. In other words, Jefferson did not believe in accepting the Bible as the inerrant or infallible word of God. Jefferson provides some advice to Peter regarding judging aspects of the Bible that “contradict the laws of nature”:

“But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that it’s falsehood would be more improbable than a change of the laws of nature in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts &c., but it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 10, 1787

Jefferson advocates weighing what we know about nature, in this case astronomy, with the claims of the Bible and is clearly skeptical about the historical accuracy of such events. At the same time, he acknowledges that millions of people believe supernatural accounts in the Bible and that it cannot be dismissed lightly.

Jefferson does not tell Peter what to believe, but he does tell him to be unafraid of the consequences of conducting an inquiry.

“Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement. If that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO PETER CARR, AUGUST 10, 1787

Is it possible to evaluate religion based on human reason and to accept the truth of a religion without faith? I am skeptical. I wrote about Jefferson’s views on religion in more detail earlier this year, focusing on what is known as The Jefferson Bible. In his version of the New Testament Gospels, Jefferson retained the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus while excising all of the miracles. This turns Jesus from the son of God into just another moral philosopher which was probably Jefferson’s intention. While Jefferson’s views on religion were no doubt unorthodox for his times, he never asserted the absence of God and charges of atheism were unfounded. Jefferson more closely resembled what we refer to as an agnostic today.

Jefferson concludes his letter to Peter with a warning about the inducements of travel, especially at a young age. While Jefferson conceded that travel can broaden one’s horizons and result in more wisdom, he believed that travel tends to make people unhappy. Upon returning home, life might seem dull in comparison with the “pomp and pleasure” of travel: “Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives.” Jefferson seems to be counseling Peter to focus on his education and being useful in Virginia. Jefferson himself loved France and his advice on travel is a bit baffling for the modern reader.

Peter Carr completed his education and became a moderately successful politician in Virginia, albeit never coming close to the prominence of his famous uncle. Carr died in 1815 at the age of forty-five. Thomas Jefferson died eleven years later on July 4, 1826 at the age of 83.

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Before the invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century, the written word was preserved in hand-written manuscripts produced by scribes and monks. This labor-intensive process acted as a filter. Only the most important works were preserved over the centuries. There is no doubt that much that was worthy failed to make the cut. For example, we know that less than ten percent of the plays written by Aeschylus have survived. Most of the creative and historical works produced in the ancient world are lost.

Hesiod was a poet who lived in Greece in the eight century BC. We do not know the exact span of his life and it is possible that he was active even before Homer. He lived toward the end of what is known as the Greek Dark Age, a period from 1200 BC to 800 BC when civilization had regressed and the written script of the Mycenaean civilization fell out of use. Hesiod and Homer composed poetry in the oral tradition, but the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet in Greece allowed their works to be preserved. While Homer is far more celebrated today, Hesiod provides a very interesting window into Ancient Greek civilization on the cusp of revitalization that would last several centuries and culminate in a new golden age.

There is little doubt that Hesiod produced many more works than the two poems which have been preserved. The son of a merchant seaman from Asia Minor who immigrated to Boeotia, Hesiod made his living as a farmer and herder on the eastern slopes of Mount Helicon. In Theogony, Hesiod claims divine inspiration as the source of his insights into the origin of the Greek gods. We are presented with a detailed, and admittedly sometimes tedious, accounting of the origins of the earth and heaven, the rise of the Titans, and their eventual overthrow leading to the supremacy of the Olympian Gods led by Zeus.

Hesiod’s Theogony is interesting but it was probably only comprehensible because I previously read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Although not a primary source, Hamilton does an excellent job making the Greek gods understandable and her book is the best choice for most readers interested in the subject. I found Hesiod’s Works and Days to be far more interesting than Theogony. Both works are included in the Oxford World’s Classics edition translated by M.L. West.

In Works and Days, Hesiod shares his wisdom about living a good life in Ancient Greece. While much of his advice has to do with the agricultural seasons, he shares some timeless wisdom as well that resonates throughout the ages. Ostensibly produced as a set of instructions for Perses, his wayward brother, Hesiod was really addressing a much broader audience. His advice is not that far from what we read in other ancient wisdom literature. At times, I was reminded of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Technology advances but the human condition has remained relatively constant, so the pitfalls and snares Hesiod spoke of twenty-seven centuries ago can help us live a better life today.

The agricultural guidance is fascinating because it is linked to astronomical, botanical, and climatological signs that triggered certain activities appropriate for the seasons. There’s a time to plow, a time to sow, a time to harvest, and times to allow fields to lie fallow. All of this and more is discussed, with plenty of warnings of what can go wrong when activities occur out of season. However, modern readers are more likely to find Hesiod’s advice on life more interesting than his views on when to plow a field, and I have selected several such excerpts from Works and Days to allow Hesiod to speak for himself.

Good and Evil

As for those who give straight judgments to visitors and to their own people and do not deviate from what is just, their community flourishes, and the people blooms in it. Peace is about the land, fostering the young, and wide-seeing Zeus never marks out grievous war as their portion. Neither does Famine attend straight-judging men, nor Blight, and they feast on the crops they tend. For them Earth bears plentiful food, and on the mountains the oak carries acorns at its surface and bees at its centre. The fleecy sheep are laden down with wool; the womenfolk bear children that resemble their parents; they enjoy a continual sufficiency of good things. Nor do they ply on ships, but the grain-giving ploughland bears them fruit.

But for those who occupy themselves with violence and wickedness and brutal deeds, Kronos’ son, wide-seeing Zeus, marks out retribution. Often a whole community together suffers in consequence of a bad man who does wrong and contrives evil. From heaven, Kronos’ son brings disaster upon them, famine and with it plague, and the people waste away. The womenfolk do not give birth, and households decline, by Olympian Zeus’ design. At other times again he either destroys those men’s broad army or city wall, or punishes their ships at sea.

Works and Days, p. 41-42

For if a man is willing to say what he knows to be just, to him wide-seeing Zeus gives prosperity; but whoever deliberately lies in his sworn testimony, therein, by injuring Right, he is blighted past healing; his family remains more obscure thereafter, while the true-sworn man’s line gains in worth.

Works and Days, p. 45

Hard Work

Hunger goes always with a workshy man. Gods and men disapprove of that man who lives without working, like in temper to the blunt-tailed drones who wear away the toil of the bees, eating it in idleness. You should embrace work-tasks in their due order, so that your granaries may be full of substance in its season. It is from work that men are rich in flocks and wealthy, and a working man is much dearer to the immortals. Work is no reproach, but not working is a reproach; and if you work, it will readily come about that a workshy man will envy you as you become wealthy. Wealth brings worth and prestige. But whatever your fortune, work is preferable, that is, if you turn your blight-witted heart from others’ possessions toward work and show concern for livelihood as I tell you.

Works and Days, p. 46

If your spirit in your breast yearns for riches, do as follows, and work, work upon work.

Works and Days, p. 48

Work, foolish Perses, do the work that the gods have marked out for men, lest one day with children and wife, sick at heart, you look for livelihood around the neighbours and they pay no heed. Twice, three times you may be successful, but if you harass them further, you will achieve nothing, all your speeches will be in vain, and however wide your words range its will be no use. No, I suggest you reflect on the clearing of your debts and the avoidance of famine.

Works and Days, p. 49

I am confident that you will be happy as you draw on the stores under your roof; you will reach the bright spring in prosperity, and not look towards others, rather will another man be in need of you.

Works and Days, p. 51

Kindness and Charity

Invite to dinner him who is friendly, and leave your enemy be; and invite above all him who lives near you. For if something untoward happens at your place, neighbours come ungirt, but relations have to gird themselves. A bad neighbor is as big a bane as a good one is a boon: he has got good value who has got a good neighbor. Nor would a cow be lost, but for a good neighbor. Get good measure from your neighbor, and give good measure back, with the measure itself and better if you can, so that when in need another time you may find something to rely on. Seek no evil gains: evil gains are no better than losses.

Works and Days, p. 47

For if a man gives voluntarily, even a big gift, he is glad at the giving and rejoices in his heart; but if a man takes of his own accord, trusting in shamelessness, even something little, that puts a frost on the heart.

Works and Days, p. 47

The tongue’s best treasure among men is when it is sparing, and its greatest charm is when it goes in measure. If you speak ill, you may well hear greater yourself. And be not of bad grace at the feast thronged with guests: when all share, the pleasure is greatest and the expense least.

Works and Days, p. 58

Do as I say; and try to avoid being the object of men’s evil rumour. Rumour is a dangerous thing, light and easy to pick up, but hard to support and difficult to get rid of. No rumour ever dies that many folk rumour. She too is somehow a goddess.

Works and Days, p. 59

Procrastination

Do not put things off till tomorrow and the next day. A man of ineffectual labour, a postponer, does not fill his granary: it is application that promotes your cultivation, whereas a postponer of labour is constantly wrestling with Blights.

Works and Days, p. 49

Many are the ills that a workshy man, waiting on empty hope, in want of livelihood, complains of to his heart. Hope is no good provider for a needy man sitting in the parlour without substance to depend on. Point out to your laborers while it is still midsummer: ‘It will not always be summer. Built your huts.’

Works and Days, p. 52

Avoid shady seats and sleeping till sunrise at harvest time, when the sun parches the skin. At that time get on with it and gather home the harvest, rising before dawn so that your livelihood may be assured.

Works and Days, p. 54

Compounding, Risk, and Redundancy

For if you lay down even a little on a little, and do this often, even that may well grow big. He who adds to what is there, wards off burning hunger. What is stored up at home is not a source of worry; better for things to be in the house, for what is outside is at risk. It is good to take from what is available, but sorrow to the heart to be wanting what is not available. I suggest you reflect on this.

Works and Days, p. 48

Take the trouble to provide yourself with two ploughs at home, a self-treed one and a joined one, for it is much better so: if you should break one, you can set the other to the oxen.

Works and Days, p. 50

Do not put all your substance in ships’ holds, but leave the greater part and ship the lesser; for it is a fearful thing to meet with disaster among the waves of the sea, and a fearful thing if you put too great a burden up on your cart and smash the axle and the cargo is spoiled. Observe due measure; opportuneness is best in everything.

Works and Days, p. 57

Hopefully these excerpts from Works and Days provide a sense of Hesiod’s style and sound life advice.

There is much more that he has to say, and I think that many readers would profit from reading this short work. At just twenty-five pages, it is more of an essay than a book and can be read in about an hour. Many of the themes he deals with are timeless and appear in other ancient wisdom literature. The Mediterranean had a high degree of economic and cultural integration during Hesiod’s lifetime and it is very likely that he either influenced or was influenced by books of the Old Testament such as Proverbs.

The scene below shows the dance of the Muses on Helicon, the site of Hesiod’s inspiration for Theogony.

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Twenty years had passed since the great warrior last saw his wife and infant son before he sailed to Troy as part of an alliance that defeated the Trojans and recovered Helen whose abduction sparked the conflict. While the surviving warriors had long since returned to peaceful tranquility in their homes, Odysseus bemoaned his fate. Held against his will on an enchanted island by a beautiful goddess who promised him immortality, Odysseus wanted nothing more than to return home. He willingly accepted mortality to brave the seas alone, on a simple raft, and was nearly lost before washing ashore in a strange but hospitable land.

The Iliad is an epic poem about seven weeks toward the end of the decade-long Trojan War. The Odyssey can be considered a sequel but it is a very different story. In The Iliad, Homer goes into great detail about the traditions and horror of ancient warfare. I found it challenging to write about The Iliad for many reasons. The story portrays a culture and warrior ethos foreign to modern readers. In contrast, The Odyssey features a storyline that modern readers find easier to relate to. Of course, Odysseus encounters gods, goddesses, monsters, and other mythic creatures in his adventures, and we cannot relate to that world, but many of us know well the longing for home when we are far removed from friends and family.

While Odysseus suffered homesickness, his estate on Ithaca had been besieged by a hundred young men who were courting his wife and consuming his wealth. His twenty year old son, Telemachus, had no recollection of his father, and had yet to mature into a man capable of defending his home. Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, grieved the loss of her husband and she was ambivalent about ceding to the will of her parents and others who were pressuring her to pick a suitor and remarry. One gets the sense that Penelope liked the attention, at some level, since she gave the suitors hope by not declaring that she wished to remain single. Penelope, most likely in her late thirties, remained an attractive woman desired by her younger suitors.

This is the scene we are given at the beginning of The Odyssey as the arc of the story moves toward its ultimate resolution. Odysseus eventually prevailed and his home and family were restored to him, but not after much anguish and the intervention of the gods. The gods decide that Odysseus has suffered for too long and plans are put in motion to send him home. Calypso, the goddess holding Odysseus on her enchanted island, was ordered by Hermes to release him. After helping Odysseus build his makeshift raft, Calypso sent him on his way.

But the god Poseidon found out and tried to kill Odysseus in retribution for what Odysseus did to his one-eyed cyclops son several years before. Despite Poseidon’s best efforts, Odysseus made it to shore and was rescued by a beautiful princess. The King and Queen, after extending much hospitality to Odysseus before even knowing his name, eventually asked him to tell his story. This created an opportunity for Homer to have Odysseus tell of his adventures after Troy in a series of long flashbacks. Odysseus took the time to reminisce about the fall of Troy and the return journey with his men, a story of adventure and misfortune like few others in literature. The details of these adventures are well documented in summaries elsewhere but I will leave them out of my account. I would urge everyone to read The Odyssey for themselves rather than spoil it with attempts at a summary. Odysseus was eventually sent on his way after receiving many gifts and much honor, escorted back to Ithaca on a magical ship that steers itself.

Meanwhile, the goddess Athena sent Telemachus to see King Nestor in Pylos who extended great hospitality to the young man and then sent him on his way to see King Menelaus in Sparta. These kings told Telemachus stories of his father’s bravery. They did not know what happened to Odysseus after leaving Troy, but the trip was an important one for a young man lacking confidence and strong male role models. Telemachus returned to Ithaca just as Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, took refuge in the home of one of his old slaves, a swineherd. From a practical perspective, Odysseus can hardly just show up at home and confront a hundred young men in the prime of their lives. A master strategist, Odysseus first kept his identity even from his own son, but eventually both the swineherd and his son learned who he is.

With Athena providing invaluable support, Odysseus and Telemachus formulated a plan to confront the suitors and reclaim their home. They had the help of two loyal slaves, but are badly outnumbered in a contest with the suitors. Odysseus, known for his cunning strategy, showed up as a non-threatening beggar. The suitors ridiculed him and treated him poorly, a major violation of cultural norms of hospitality prevalent in the ancient world. Penelope met her husband without recognizing him, and he spun a tall tale about having met Odysseus on the island of Crete years earlier. When an old slave recognized a scar on Odysseus while washing him, Odysseus prohibited the slave from revealing his identity, with help from Athena who distracted Penelope. The scene is now set for the denouement.

Penelope suggested an archery contest to decide which suitor will win her hand. The bow to be used was one that Odysseus left at home when he sailed to Troy. None of the suitors could even string the bow, let alone use it in the contest. Odysseus was allowed to make the attempt, amid much mockery and laugher among the suitors who believed the old man had no chance. Odysseus strung the bow and fired an arrow through the holes in a dozen axe heads lined up in a row. The suitors were amazed, but their surprise will soon turn to horror. Odysseus proceeded to pick off the suitors one by one with his arrows. When he ran out, the slaughter continued with the help of Telemachus and the loyal slaves.

In due course, all of the suitors were killed. After being forced to clean up the blood-soaked mess in the room, the disloyal servant girls, who carried on affairs with the suitors, were executed by hanging. Penelope was informed that Odysseus returned but had trouble believing that it could be true. She was only convinced after Odysseus told her how he built their bed around an old olive tree, making it obvious that he knew the layout of the inner sanctum of their home that few had ever seen. The couple was reunited at last, but the story is not over. Odysseus must go to his elderly father, Laertes, who has retreated into the hills in grief, seeking solace in manual labor. Odysseus somewhat cruelly told the old man a tall tale about his identity before admitting who he was, and father and son were finally reunited.

As the news of the suitors’ demise spread throughout the community, the angry relatives of the young men were outraged and took up arms. The story concludes as Odysseus and Telemachus, now a proven fighter, go out to face the angry mob. The slaughter begins and is only brought to an end by the intervention of Athena. The end result is that Odysseus has been restored to his rightful place on Ithaca at last and the epic ends.

Great literature is timeless because the human stories that are told resonate hundreds or even thousands of years later. This is clearly true for Homer’s epic poems. While The Iliad might be hard to relate to, especially for those who have never fought in a war, The Odyssey has something for nearly everyone. All of us can relate to being homesick. The story of Telemachus is a classic tale of coming of age in the shadow of a famous parent. We are faced with moral quandaries throughout the adventures, but never as much as when Odysseus chooses ruthless vengeance and kills the suitors. He had to reclaim his home and there was certainly going to be bloodshed, but was it necessary to kill everyone in this brutal manner? Did the disloyal servants, who were after all slaves, deserve to die because of their actions? Many of these actions are repugnant to us today, but we are steeped in the Judeo-Christian ethic that was foreign in Homer’s world.

On the other hand, we can learn something from the attitudes the ancients had when it came to hospitality for strangers. The first instinct, indeed one that was sanctioned by Zeus himself, was to assist a stranger in need. When brought into a home, a stranger must be given food and drink and be allowed to rejuvenate before being questioned about their background. This applied, to some extent, even to dirty beggars and it is why Odysseus was able to gain entry into his own home when he was disguised as one. There were obviously limits to ancient hospitality, but it seems superior to modern hospitably in many ways.

Telemachus was not a child but hardly yet a fully developed man. At the age of twenty, he resembled many young people of the modern era who have yet to find their way in the world. His story is also about lacking a strong positive male role model, something hardly foreign in modernity given increasing rates of divorce and the resulting broken homes. Grief and obvious depression prevented Laertes from playing an active role in the upbringing of his grandson, leaving him adrift. Telemachus had to make the trip to see Nestor and Menelaus because he needed strong male role models to fortify himself in order to confront the suitors. He does seem more assertive as the story develops.

Odysseus loved his wife, but he was not loyal to her. He had lengthy affairs with Calypso and Circe. Granted, they were both goddesses who gave him little choice, but I don’t think Odysseus was suffering greatly during those interludes. On the other hand, Penelope was expected to remain faithful to Odysseus for two decades, and it would have been a major issue if Odysseus had returned to find that this was not the case. When Odysseus met Agamemnon’s shade on his trip to Elysium, as told in his flashback, Agamemnon told of how he was killed by his evil wife, Clytemnestra, when he returned from Troy. Clytemnestra had carried on an affair with Aegisthus during Agamemnon’s absence. Penelope was always faithful to Odysseus, despite the double standard, and ultimately Odysseus rejected immortality on Calypso’s island to come back to her.

I read two translations of The Odyssey during a slow reading of the poem in April. I started with Samuel Butler’s translation which is included in my full set of Great Books of the Western World. I followed up with Emily Wilson’s translation which was published in 2017. I wrote in more detail about these translators in my article on The Iliad last month. Butler’s translation is much older, published in the late nineteenth century, and is in prose. He uses the names of the Roman gods which poses a bit of a challenge since I am more familiar with names of the Greek gods, but this was not insurmountable. Wilson’s poetic translation is simply brilliant and flows very well for the modern reader. I first read Wilson’s translation several years ago and enjoyed reading it again, this time much more deliberately. I also own a copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey which I read around 2015. I only used it as a reference this time.

Emily Wilson’s translation includes an excellent introduction and useful maps. Readers who are approaching Homer for the first time should definitely opt for Wilson’s translation which also features extensive endnotes and a glossary of all characters featured in the story. This is invaluable, especially for those who are less familiar with the Greek gods.

Readers who are new to Homer might want to read The Odyssey before The Iliad even though this is out of chronological order. This is especially true for younger readers. I have a much greater appreciation for The Iliad after taking the time to really study it, but it is a far more challenging story to truly understand. The Odyssey, in contrast, is a great adventure story accessible to everyone. It is not necessary to understand all of the events of The Iliad to enjoy The Odyssey.

I did not originally intend to read Homer as part of my reading plan for the Great Books because I was already familiar with these works from prior readings. However, I am glad that I took a month to reach each epic slowly. I now feel like I have a better understanding of these poems and am better equipped to approach the works of the Greek tragedians, all of whom wrote plays for audiences that knew Homer extremely well. I will miss fewer nuances and enjoy the plays much more since I took the effort to read Homer carefully.

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The decade-long conflict started after a Trojan prince abducted the wife of the King of Sparta. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris was an honored guest of Menelaus when he breached all norms of hospitality by abducting Helen, taking her back to Troy, and marrying her. This outrageous behavior prompted a coalition of Greek states to sail to Troy and lay siege to the city. The alliance was led by Agamemnon, the powerful King of Mycenae and the brother of Menelaus.

Homer launches into The Iliad with no background about the events leading up to the war and he gives no account of the nine years of fighting that precede the events of the poem. His epic covers just over seven momentous weeks and ends with the funeral of a great Trojan hero. We are not told about the conclusion of the war and many readers are surprised to learn that there is no mention of the Trojan Horse!

The modern reader approaching The Iliad with no understanding of Ancient Greece might find the plot hard to follow. But Homer’s audience would not have found the story confusing. The Iliad was made to be recited, often with music, and the audience had an intimate understanding of the gods, their personalities, and the history of the Trojan War, a conflict foundational to Greek mythology and culture.

Historians differ regarding whether the Trojan War actually took place. If it did, the war occurred twelve or thirteen centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. When the contemporaries of Socrates and Plato heard the poem recited in the sixth century BC, The Iliad already represented “ancient history.” The Trojan War might have seemed as ancient to Socrates as the Crusades seem to us today.

The identity of Homer himself is shrouded in mystery. Some scholars believe that there was no Homer and that the poems we have today are composites of various oral traditions that evolved over many centuries. Samuel Butler, a nineteenth century scholar and the author of a prose translation of The Iliad, believed that Homer was a woman. Robin Lane Fox, the author of Homer and His Iliad, believes that there was a historical Homer who composed The Iliad in the mid-eighth century BC. Ultimately, we cannot be certain of authorship or dating. But we can be certain that The Iliad was a foundational element of culture in Greece by the sixth century BC.

When I decided to begin reading The Great Books of the Western World last year, I was not starting entirely from scratch. I was assigned Homer’s epic poems in college. I went on to read Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey again as an adult. In 2020, I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and found it so compelling that I gave away copies. When I read about Wilson’s translation of The Iliad, published in 2023, I made a note of it but did not intend to read it right away.

I was eager to start on books that are entirely new to me, but that was a mistake. It quickly became apparent that I lacked sufficient understanding of Greek culture and mythology to fully appreciate the works of the Greek tragedians. Edith Hamilton’s books helped a great deal and, with this remedial education, I decided to start at the beginning by reading The Iliad and The Odyssey again to make certain that I fully understand both epics and have internalized the personalities of the characters.

I devoted the majority of my reading time in March to The Iliad.

This article is not a “review” of The Iliad. Homer’s epic poems have been the subject of countless dissertations and I am not qualified to be a literary critic of ancient poetry. I have no interest in creating a summary since so many already exist.

My goal is to describe observations related to the wrath of Achilles. This is by no means a comprehensive study, just aspects of the story that I took special note of during my reading. The Iliad is a complex epic with many notable characters. Lengthy books have been written analyzing the plot. So, obviously I leave out many key details. This exercise is mostly for my own benefit since I would like to revisit my thoughts in the future when I return to Homer, as I surely will.

Following my account of the wrath of Achilles, I’ll describe the translations that I have read and present my suggestions for how someone unfamiliar with Homer might proceed. I hope this will be useful information for first time readers of The Iliad.

The Wrath of Achilles

The Iliad opens with Chryses, a priest of the god Apollo, begging Agamemnon to return his daughter, Chryseis, who was captured by the Greeks and given to Agamemnon as a slave. It was common for women to be captured during raids and given as “trophies” to warriors. Agamemnon not only rejects Chryses’ distraught pleas but treats him with extreme rudeness. Chryses prays to Apollo who punishes the Greek encampment with a plague. Calchas, a prophet in the Greek camp, eventually reveals that Agamemnon’s refusal to release Chryseis was the cause of the plague.

Agamemnon reacts with fury but Achilles promises to protect Calchas from any retribution for revealing the cause of the plague. Achilles is furious that Agamemnon continues to resist returning Chryseis. After all, Achilles had no quarrel with the Trojans and went to war to help retrieve Agamemnon’s sister-in-law from captivity. Even worse, Agamemnon has demanded that he be given another man’s trophy in exchange for giving up Chryseis which he must do to end the plague. He demands that Achilles turn over Briseis, a woman who was given to Achilles as his trophy. Of course, this sends Achilles into a fit of rage:

I did not come to Troy because I wanted 
to fight against the warriors of Troy.
They never did me any harm at all.
They never raided cows from me nor horses,
nor blighted fertile fields that feed the men
of Phthia, far away across so many
shadowy hills, reverberating seas.
I came with you, you brazen cheat, to please you!
To claim back compensation from the Trojans 
for Menelaus and for you — you dog-face!
But none of that means anything to you.
You do not even care! And now you threaten 
to take away the trophy that I worked for,
after the sons of Greece gave it to me.

Only divine intervention prevents Achilles from drawing his sword and killing Agamemnon on the spot. Agamemnon was the “commander in chief” but he was not an unquestioned supreme leader who other leading men were afraid to challenge. Greece was not a unified kingdom but a collection of small kingdoms in alliance with each other. In such a situation, rivalries are bound to arise, particularly when matters of honor are at stake. When a man is given a possession, which unfortunately was the status of enslaved women, threats to take the possession away are met with fury.

Achilles was exhibiting aspects of human psychology that are still prevalent today.

Once Briseis is taken from Achilles, he refuses to fight and nurses his fury in his camp. This takes the most important Greek warrior out of the picture with devastating consequences. As Homer tells us in his opening, Achilles’ wrath “caused the Greeks immeasurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades.”

Agamemnon’s duty as leader of the entire war effort took a back seat to his insatiable pride and acquisitiveness, something that he would be forced to finally acknowledge in Book 9. Agamemnon sends Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix to offer to return Briseis, supposedly untouched by Agamemnon, along with numerous very valuable items. Achilles will have none of it and rejects the overture, only saying that he will enter the fight if the Trojans begin to burn his own ships.

When the Trojans finally reach the Greek ships, Achilles is approached by Patroclus who begs to be allowed to enter the fight. Patroclus and Achilles have a long history prior to the war and have an extremely close relationship, with Achilles clearly in the senior role. Achilles allows Patroclus to use his armor, hoping to fool the Trojans into thinking that Achilles himself has entered the battle. This has the intended effect at first. The Trojans are terrified and Patroclus pushes the enemy back, but contrary to his orders from Achilles, Patroclus pushes too far and is killed by Hector, the most formidable Trojan warrior and the brother of Paris, the man who started the conflict.

Achilles is devastated by the loss of his closest brother in arms and his anger soon turns to fury. His rage, previously directed at Agamemnon, is now directed at Hector and Achilles is out for blood. He is determined to make the Trojans pay for the death of Patroclus, to kill Hector, and have his body consumed by birds, dogs, and worms.

In Book 19, Agamemnon returns Briseis and gives Achilles all that he promised. But at this point, Achilles is so numb with grief and rage at Hector that he is ready to move on from his rage at Agamemnon which, by now, seems trifling in comparison:

Now, son of Atreus [Agamemnon], did this
benefit either of us, you or me —
that we were so upset, so full of rage,
our hearts and minds so eaten up by conflict,
over a girl? If only Artemis [a god] 
had killed her with an arrow by the ships,
the day I sacked Lyrnessus, and seized her.
Then many Greeks would not have died and taken
the boundless earth between their teeth, defeated
by enemies, while I was full of wrath.
All this was advantageous to the Trojans
and Hector. I believe the memory
of conflict between you and me will last
a very long time in the minds of Greeks.
But that is in the past now. Let it go,
despite our grief. We must suppress our feelings
inside ourselves, out of necessity.
I cease my anger now. It is not right
for me to rage with never-ending fury.

But Achilles still rages with never-ending fury. His target has just shifted to Hector.

Going back into battle means that Achilles was destined to die. His mother, the goddess Thetis, knew that Achilles must choose to either live a long but uneventful life if he abandons the war and sails home or he will surely die in battle. Achilles does not even hesitate in making his choice. He will take a glorious and honorable death over flight. He is so furious that nothing less than Hector’s death will suffice.

Achilles goes on a rampage, killing so many Trojans that the course of the Scamander river is changed due to being clogged with so many bodies. The river god does not appreciate being filled with bodies and rises up against Achilles, nearly killing him, but Achilles manages to escape. Achilles is distracted long enough for the Trojans to retreat into their walled city, but Hector refuses to retreat. Standing outside the walls, his parents and his wife beg him to enter the city knowing that he is no match for the might of Achilles. When Hector sees Achilles approach, he loses his nerve and runs. Achilles, one of the fastest men to ever live, chases Hector around the city.

Hector is tricked by the goddess Athena into thinking that one of his brothers, Deiphobus, has come to his aid so he decides to stop running and face Achilles, but Deiphobus soon vanishes. Hector is mortally wounded by Achilles. As he dies, Hector begs to be returned to his family to receive a proper burial but Achilles refuses.

Dog, do not beg or speak of knees or parents. 
If only I had will and heart to do it
I would carve up your flesh and eat it raw,
for the abominations you have done me.
No one can save your body from the dogs,
not even if they bring me as a ransom 
ten times or twenty times the usual rate
and weight it out and promise even more.
Not even if Dardanian Priam promised
to have you weighed and give your weight in gold.
Not even so will your mother ever 
lay you out properly upon a bier,
and mourn and grieve for you, the child she birthed.
The dogs and birds will eat you up completely.

The death of Hector is not enough to satisfy Achilles.

He strips Hector’s armor, pierces the tendon behind his feet, threads leather straps through the tendons, and drags Hector behind his chariot for all of Troy to see from the tall walls. Hector’s death foreshadows the fall of Troy. Priam is devastated by the loss of his son. Hector is brought back to the Greek camp and treated dishonorably, but the gods intervene so that his body does not degrade even after many days of exposure and being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot.

After giving Patroclus a proper funeral, Achilles still has no intention of returning Hector’s body until Zeus intervenes, sending a messenger to order Achilles to release the body to Priam who travels to Achilles’ camp accompanied only by one elderly man charged with driving the wagon carrying the ransom. Priam and Achilles meet, both men are reduced to tears due to their losses, and Priam begs for his son’s body. Achilles relents and allows Priam to take Hector back to Troy and agrees to a lengthy truce to permit the Trojans to provide a proper funeral.

The Iliad concludes with Hector’s funeral but Homer’s audience was well aware of the subsequent death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse trick, the fall of Troy, and the death of Priam at the hands of Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son.

Emily Wilson characterizes Achilles’ anger as “cataclysmic wrath” and this seems very appropriate. Achilles does not have a typical anger management problem. He goes absolutely ballistic when wronged to the point where he sat out much of the action over fateful days during which countless Greek warriors died, in large part due to his absence. When Patroclus is killed, Achilles turns his rage from Agamemnon to Hector, and the rage is turned up several notches.

The code of honor among warriors of Homer’s world is not entirely alien to us today. Warriors still fight for honor and to protect their brothers in arms, and close bonds are still formed by those who fight in wars. Anger is still a constant problem in war and it is often a struggle for leaders to prevent soldiers from committing atrocities due to rage and fury. Hatred still drives human behavior. Envy of what others have, especially when it is seen to be acquired unjustly, still permeates human psychology. These emotions, when unchecked, can still lead to disaster.

Translations

Homeric scholars might disagree on many things, but I think that all of them would say that the optimal way to read The Iliad and The Odyssey is to learn Ancient Greek and read from the original. Better yet, one could take this a step further and recite these epic poems in Greek as they might have been performed thousands of years ago. For those of us unable or unwilling to go to such extreme lengths, we must rely on translations that inevitably lose some of the essence of Homer’s original composition.

I started this project with a long held belief that The Iliad is a slog full of gratuitous violence and mayhem. This was my impression when I read the poem in college and later as an adult. My recent reading ended with a much greater appreciation for the messages that Homer was trying to convey. If you’ve found The Iliad to be a boring slog, it is probably due to lack of background or a less than engaging translation.

Edith Hamilton’s book, Mythology, first published in 1942 is excellent for providing the backstory of the Greek gods. I wrote a review of the book earlier this year and kept it by my side as I read The Iliad. I often found myself referring to the book when a god was referenced. Homer’s audience would have already known about the personalities of the gods but I certainly did not have a full understanding before reading Hamilton.

Samuel Butler

Since I have the full set of Great Books of the Western World, I knew that I wanted to read the translation of The Iliad included in the set. The prose translation by Samuel Butler is not one that is commonly read today, probably because it was published in the late nineteenth century. I found it quite readable. Butler did not use archaic language and his choice of words seems intuitive to me. However, the Great Books editors only provide one page introduction and there is no glossary or end notes.

Butler uses the names of the Roman gods that correspond to the Greek gods. This can be somewhat confusing, but reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology helped since she provides information on how the names correspond. I kept an index card with the names of the Greek and Roman gods to keep things straight in my mind. It did not take long to get used to Athena being referred to as Minerva, Hephaestus as Vulcan, Aphrodite as Venus, Zeus as Jove, Hera as Juno, etc.

In terms of the book’s physical attributes, the Great Books set uses relatively small type in a two column per page format with very limited space in the margins for making notes. This is common to all of the books in the set and a fairly significant limitation. However, the upside is that the physical book is fairly small compared to translations with a more spacious format.

A glaring omission is a complete lack of maps. I am not sure if this is a decision Butler himself made or if the editors of the Great Books set made the decision to omit maps in order to save space. I found myself referring to alternate sources for maps as I read the Butler translation. The Iliad often refers to locations that would have been familiar to an ancient audience but have no meaning to modern readers, at least those of us who are not intimately familiar with modern-day Greece and Turkey.

Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad is simply outstanding in terms of the artistry evident in her rendering of the poem. The quotes presented in this article are from Wilson’s translation. She also provides the reader with a lengthy introduction, translator’s notes, end notes, a comprehensive glossary, and several maps. I found Wilson’s poetic translation superior to Butler’s prose from an aesthetic standpoint given that The Iliad was meant to be recited rather than read. Although I am not in the habit of reading books out loud, it is easy to see the effect her translation would have by simply speaking the words on a few pages.

I am no expert when it comes to poetry, but the stylistic virtues are particularly evident when one encounters sections of The Iliad that are tedious to read in prose. A great example is the catalog of ships and their leaders that appear in Book 2. This comprehensive listing is not exactly riveting reading to modern eyes since the names and places mean little to us. But for an ancient audience listening to The Iliad, the catalog was very meaningful. Wherever the poem was recited in the Greek world, those who listened identified their towns and cities among the listing and maybe they even cheered. Wilson suggests reading the catalog out loud if it seems tedious.

Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad was published in 1974. I own this book but only used it as a reference. I read this translation in 2017 along with Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey. The book contains a good introduction but lacks the level of detail found in Wilson’s introduction. There is less guidance for the reader overall.

When I read the Fitzgerald translation, I did not have much of a background in Greek mythology and my impression was that it was an endless war story with blood and gore predominating the narrative. This was not Fitzgerald’s fault but due to my lack of appreciation for the poem. The next time I read The Iliad, I will probably return to the Fitzgerald translation since my impression will no doubt be different.

My Approach

I decided to read the Butler and Wilson translations concurrently. Prior to reading either translation, I read Wilson’s introduction and translator’s notes in full. I would not recommend this to someone totally new to The Iliad since Wilson reveals the plot in the introduction, but since I already knew the story I found her insights valuable. Since my last reading of The Iliad was years ago, it was a good refresher course.

My procedure was to read each book (chapter) in the Butler translation followed by the same book in the Wilson translation. While reading Wilson, I decided to flip to the end notes after every couple hundred lines. This seemed like a good compromise between keeping in the flow of the story and benefiting from Wilson’s commentary. Referring to the end notes too often would break the flow and ruin the overall experience of reading the poem. I kept her maps bookmarked and referred to them constantly. Every time a new character appeared, I would refer to the glossary. I would often refer to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology when the gods came into the picture.

I was happy with this approach and found the repetition of reading two translations valuable since I really wanted to internalize the story. I would definitely recommend Wilson over Butler for those who are looking for just one translation.

Final Thoughts

The Iliad tells the tale of heroes engaged in a brutal war, but it is much more than that. Homer had a philosophical message to convey and much to say about the fleeting nature of human life. Although his epic is set in a culture that modern people cannot fully understand, taking the time to read The Iliad slowly, with the help of Emily Wilson’s end notes, is something that I think everyone should do at least once.

For many years, I regarded The Odyssey as superior to The Iliad. This was because The Odyssey has more of a sense of forward momentum due to the fact that Odysseus travels from place to place in the narrative. It’s an entertaining adventure story.

In contrast, The Iliad takes more work on the part of the reader. The gods are present in both epics, but their actions in The Iliad seem more frequent and are of greater consequence. To understand the beauty of The Iliad requires the reader to understand the gods and mythology more broadly. The effort is definitely worthwhile.

This month, I am slowly reading The Odyssey using the same approach that I used for The Iliad. I plan to write an article with my impressions in late April or early May.

Copyright, Disclosures, and Privacy Information

Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC.  The Rational Walk is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

2023: Fourth Quarter • Third Quarter • Second Quarter • First Quarter
2022: Fourth Quarter • Third Quarter • Second Quarter • First Quarter
2021: Fourth Quarter • Third Quarter
2020: Complete Reading List • Summer Book Recommendations
2019: Holiday Book Recommendations
2018: Holiday Book Recommendations

The Diary of a Young Girl

Author: Anne Frank
Year of Publication: 1947
Length: 354 pages

I visited Amsterdam in 2014 and had the opportunity to tour the Anne Frank House. At that time, I read a few of Anne’s diary entries as I went through the exhibits and I purchased a guidebook with excerpts. I found the experience emotionally draining and that is probably why I never read the full diary after the trip.

Anne was only thirteen years old when her family was forced to go into hiding in July 1942. The family lived in cramped conditions in a secret annex above the warehouse and office facilities of the Opekta company where Anne’s father had worked. The entrance to the annex was disguised by a false bookcase. Only a few employees knew about the annex and they were instrumental in providing supplies. The Franks shared their hiding space with the Van Pels family and with Fritz Pfeffer, a family friend.

The family was in hiding for over two years before being discovered. We see a young girl of thirteen grow up over time, providing us with all of the details and drama of a teenage life interspersed with the constant terror of potential detection. It is gut-wrenching to read the diary knowing that Anne would later die in a concentration camp. Anne’s writing makes it clear that she had post-war plans. She did not know that her plans would never come to fruition. But her readers know.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the only survivor among the eight who went into hiding in the secret annex. After the war, he made it his mission to publish Anne’s diary and worked toward preserving what is today known as the Anne Frank House. I plan to visit the Anne Frank House again in the future since I am sure my perspective will be different now that I have read the diary.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

Author: Alfred Lansing
Year of Publication: 1959
Length: 357 pages

If you are looking for a great adventure story, pick up Alfred Lansing’s book about Earnest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. I wrote a review of the book in January, so I will not comment on it further here other than to say that I have given away several copies over the past two months.

If you’re looking for a great adventure story, buy this book!

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

Author: Candice Millard
Year of Publication: 2006
Length: 353 pages

Theodore Roosevelt consistently ranks among the top presidents and there’s no doubt that his time in office was consequential. But his popularity is also due to the fact that he’s a fascinating character and very likable. Roosevelt’s bravery is a great example of the pioneering American spirit. I must say that Roosevelt was also a little bit crazy … maybe more than a little bit. His adventures in South America more than prove this point, described in more detail in my review of Candice Millard’s excellent book.

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Author: Peter J. Williams
Year of Publication: 2018
Length: 140 pages

In Can We Trust the Gospels, Peter J. Williams makes his case for the reliability of the Gospels. Williams is the principal of Tyndale House, a research institution for Biblical scholarship. Williams is a Christian and writes from the perspective of a believer. I found his concise book to be a valuable resource for assessing the evidence that the Gospels can be relied upon to provide historical details about the life of Jesus Christ.

I wrote about this book in a longer article exploring the question of whether the Bible should be considered a foundational text in the study of western civilization. My answer, explained more fully in the article, is that understanding the Bible is very important, for believers and non-believers alike. It is difficult to fully understand our civilization without taking the time to study a book that has influenced how billions of people live their lives.

• Is the Bible a Great Book? February 2, 2024 (The Rational Walk)

The Greek Way

Author: Edith Hamilton
Year of Publication: 1930
Length: 258 pages

Edith Hamilton was one of the most important classicists of the twentieth century. After a long career in education, Hamilton retired in 1922 at the age of fifty-five and began a second career as an author. Her first book, The Greek Way, was published in 1930 and has been regarded as a classic for many decades. I would recommend The Greek Way to anyone interested in Ancient Greece, especially those who are in the process of reading translations of ancient texts for themselves. Readers interested in further details might want to read my book review.

• Review of The Greek Way, February 8, 2024 (The Rational Walk)

Crime and Punishment

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translators: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Year of Publication: 1866
Length: 600 pages

This was my second reading of Crime and Punishment. I wrote about my impressions from the first reading in the What I’ve Been Reading installment for the second quarter of 2022. Looking back at my comments, I found the book somewhat difficult to read the first time in comparison to Tolstoy. I felt more comfortable this time, partly due to familiarity with the plot and perhaps because I have also read The Brothers Karamazov. Certain quirks in Russian literature, such as the extensive use of patronymics and diminutives as alternate names, felt more natural during the second reading.

The central character of the novel is a brilliant young man with much potential who dropped out of college and descended into poverty. His severe psychological issues no doubt played a major role in his decline and transformation into a murderer. He cannot enjoy or even bear to count the money and valuables stolen from his victim and does much throughout the novel to incriminate himself. He is also capable of selflessness and great kindness in situations where he has nothing at all to gain.

Dostoevsky’s writing has religious themes and the outline of how the young man will eventually achieve redemption is revealed as the book progresses. There is much about the nature of sin, guilt, and the agonizing process of redemption. I have a draft of a “review” of the book that I have not published and probably never will. However, I know that I will return for a third reading at some point in the future. Some books are meant to be read multiple times and this is certainly one of them.

Mythology

Author: Edith Hamilton
Year of Publication: 1942
Length: 353 pages

Prior to the rapid spread of Christianity, the western world had a far different set of beliefs. The Old Testament narrative was the dominant worldview of the Jewish people, but they represented a very small minority. The Greek Gods of antiquity held far more influence in the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond. Anyone who has read The Iliad and The Odyssey understands how central the Greek Gods were to those stories and how bewildering it can be to keep track of the many different Gods and their various powers, not to mention their family relationships and quarrels.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology is an excellent introduction for readers unfamiliar with this world view. Without at least a basic understanding of Greek mythology, it is very difficult to fully appreciate Ancient Greek classics. Readers interested in further details might want to read my book review.

• Review of Mythology, February 23, 2024 (The Rational Walk)

Socrates: A Man for Our Times

Author: Paul Johnson
Year of Publication: 2012
Length: 198 pages

Socrates (470 BC - 399 BC) is an example of a man who has had an enduring influence, and that’s in spite of the fact that did not leave a written record of any kind. Socrates lived a simple life as a citizen of his beloved Athens. Thanks to the writings of Plato and Xenophon, the world continues to benefit from the wisdom of Socrates twenty-four centuries after his death.

We can approach Socrates through the writings of Plato and Xenophon, but it also helps to read a contemporary biography. Paul Johnson’s book is very informative and concise. It can be read in three or four hours. Readers interested in further details might want to read my book review.

• Review of Socrates by Paul Johnson, February 23, 2024 (The Rational Walk)

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Author: Charlie Munger
Editor: Peter Kaufman
Year of Publication: 2023
Length: 351 pages

The new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a very accessible distillation of Charlie Munger’s philosophy. After a long wait, I received the new edition of the book in March. I own two earlier editions of the Almanack so this was not my first exposure to the Munger philosophy. But all great books should be read multiple times over a lifetime since we change over time, accumulating new life experiences. I gained many new insights from revisiting the contents again which I discussed in a recent article.

The Iliad

Author: Homer
Year of Publication: ~ 8th Century BC
Length: 179 pages (Samuel Butler’s translation)
Length: 761 pages (Emily Wilson’s translation)

I read two translations of The Iliad in March:

• Samuel Butler’s translation was first published in 1897 and is included in Great Books of the Western World, a set of fifty-four books that I acquired in January. Although Butler’s prose translation is not among those commonly read today, I found it relatively easy to follow, perhaps because this is not my first time reading The Iliad. Butler uses the names of the Roman gods that correspond to Greek gods, so this can be a bit confusing. However, with the help of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, this was not a major impediment.

• Emily Wilson’s translation was published in September 2023 and is simply outstanding in terms of the artistry evident in her poetic translation. She also provides the reader with a lengthy introduction, translator’s notes, end notes, a glossary, and several maps. While Butler’s prose translation tells the story, Wilson’s poetry is more enjoyable to read. I would highly recommend Wilson’s translation for the first time reader of The Iliad. However, I would suggest that the first time reader jump right into the poem before reading Wilson’s introduction. Reading the poem, in consultation with end notes, is sufficient to understand the plot. Reading the introduction first is a “spoiler” as it reveals the entire storyline.

Readers should not be misled by the dramatic difference in page counts for the translations. The Great Books of the Western World volumes use small type and narrow margins so there is a lot of text packed into a single page. In contrast, Wilson’s poetic rendering consumed many more physical pages but the font is larger and there are far fewer words per page. It is much easier to make notations in Wilson’s translation.

I am writing an article about The Iliad which will be published in the near future.

Selections from The Great Books

In addition to the books listed above, I have been reading selections from the Great Books based on a reading plan that I started in January. I have written articles about a two of these readings which appear in the list below. I departed from my plan in March to re-read The Iliad and I am re-reading The Odyssey this month. I found it necessary to revisit Homer in order to better understand the Greek tragedians. They (naturally) assume that their audience already has an understanding of Greek culture, mythology, and Homer’s epics, something I clearly lacked.

• Plato's Apology and Crito, January 22, 2024

• Plato’s Republic: Books I and II, February 9, 2024

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— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Charlie Munger strongly believed in the virtues of capitalism, but he obviously had reservations about whether he truly deserved what he “wrested” from the system.

Why did he have doubts about whether his wealth was deserved?

I suspect that part of the reason had to do with his recognition that the vast majority of people go through life “like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest” because they over-specialize in one field and lack a multidisciplinary mindset. In particular, most people are ignorant when it comes to psychological pitfalls and this creates blind spots. Those who master a multidisciplinary mindset and understand how they are susceptible to human misjudgment have an almost unfair advantage in life.

Why was “early Charlie Munger” a horrible career model for young people?

He served in World War II as a meteorologist and went on to become a successful attorney. After meeting Warren Buffett in 1959, he went into investment management and real estate development because he was not satisfied with the income that a senior partner in a law firm could expect to earn. He wanted independence and he achieved it, but felt that he had not given enough back to society in return for what he “wrested” from it. I believe that his efforts later in life to spread the secrets of his success were motivated, at least in part, by the recognition of the vast advantages he obtained early in life by mastering skills that most people completely overlook.

I disagree with the idea that “early Charlie Munger” was a bad role model, but I am grateful that he chose to share his wisdom later in life. The new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a very accessible distillation of his philosophy. After a long wait, I received the physical book earlier this month. I own two earlier editions of the Almanack so this was not my first exposure to the Munger way of thinking. But all great books should be read multiple times over a lifetime since we change over time, accumulating new life experiences. Unsurprisingly, I gained new insights from revisiting the contents again. Although the physical book is still in short supply, it is free to read on the Stripe Press website, including in a bare-bones Berkshire Mode.

It would be impossible to do justice to this book in a review of reasonable length, so I will make no such attempt. Instead, this article is primarily about inconsistency avoidance tendency which represents an entry in my series on Charlie Munger’s psychology of human misjudgment, a project that I started many years ago.

Inconsistency Avoidance Tendency

Why are human beings reluctant to change their minds? There are many reasons for unjustified intransigence, but we should keep in mind that most psychological tendencies evolved in humans for sound reasons. In a less complex society, and one more fraught with constant danger, having a default “algorithm” governing our behavior was mostly desirable. Asking “why” too often could lead to fatal results on the savanna when a predator is quickly approaching. Deep rooted algorithms built in response to how the world works can keep us out of trouble in many situations.

“It is not entirely clear why evolution would program into man’s brain an anti-change mode alongside his tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was significantly caused by a combination of the following factors:

• It facilitated faster decisions when speed of decision was an important contribution to the survival of nonhuman ancestors that were prey.

• It facilitated the survival advantage that our ancestors gained by cooperating in groups, which would have been more difficult to do if everyone was always changing responses.

• It was the best form of solution that evolution could get to in the limited number of generations between the start of literacy and today’s complex modern life.”

The problem is that modernity serves up challenges to humans that massively differ from life on the savanna. If we quickly reach conclusions and resist changes to our conclusions, regardless of contrary evidence, we are likely to make massive cognitive errors in a much more complex world. Homo sapiens first emerged about 200,000 years ago and remained in hunter-gatherer mode until roughly 10,000 years ago.

In evolutionary terms, we are built for a world that has not existed for millennia.

Bad Habits

Inconsistency avoidance tendency makes it very important to avoid the formation of bad habits early in life before they become entrenched in our behavior and minds to the point where they are nearly impossible to change.

“The rare life that is wisely lived has in it many good habits maintained and many bad habits avoided or cured. The great rule that helps here is again from Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that inconsistency-avoidance tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it.”

It is not impossible to reduce or eliminate bad habits once they are formed, as James Clear explained in his book, Atomic Habits, which I reviewed three years ago. But doing so requires implementing techniques that do not always work, at least not for all people. The abuse of alcohol and other mind-altering drugs is an excellent example. Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the oldest and most successful methods to achieve sobriety but it only has a fifty percent cure rate which obviously implies a fifty percent failure rate. Many bad habits are intractable for a significant percentage of the population. Alcoholism is just one example, albeit a particularly pernicious one.

Avoiding the formation of bad habits is so important that Charlie Munger decided to completely invert the standard words of wisdom typically delivered to students at graduation ceremonies. In a commencement address in 1986, Mr. Munger explained how the graduates should go about guaranteeing a life of failure and misery through time-tested strategies such as ingesting drugs and indulging in envy and resentment.

“The brain of man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, constructive and destructive. Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically everyone has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny.”

In 2024, addiction to electronic devices is a clear bad habit that must be avoided from childhood. Unfortunately, most children are exposed to electronics at a very early age and it is now normal for teenagers to carry smartphones. At a recent concert, I was seated directly behind a group of middle school students who were clearly addicted to their phones. No amount of scolding from teachers or ushers could get these children to stop. Society has badly failed children by not only tolerating but promoting terrible habits that encourage nonstop context switching and obstruct the natural state of flow required to become educated and productive members of society.

Proper Education

A sound education is nearly the opposite of what schools deliver in the early 21st century, a reality that has led small rebellions devoted to returning to classical education in the primary and secondary school systems. Charlie Munger’s views on the elevated bar required to develop wise citizens could not be more clear:

“Proper education is one long exercise in the augmentation of high cognition so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking maintained by resistance to change. As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance. Instead, the new ideas were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place.”

Since it is so difficult to dislodge beliefs once they are embedded in one’s mind, great efforts must be made to equip young people with the ability to think from first principles. Charlie Munger compared our minds to human eggs. Once a sperm makes its way into an egg, there is a shutoff device barring other sperm from getting in. This effect is most pernicious in the soft sciences and humanities but has also been seen in hard sciences. Toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein found it difficult to accept the full implications of quantum mechanics, despite evidence presented to him.

One way to force the mind to overcome inconsistency avoidance is to make an honest effort to understand opposing viewpoints and evidence:

“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”

The skill of playing devil’s advocate can identify weak points in our beliefs. In high school speech and debate, students are expected to be able to make arguments for or against a position regardless of whether their personal beliefs align with their arguments. This can be extremely uncomfortable, but essential for the formation of a sound mind. In today’s world, I suspect that many would object to such techniques on the grounds of violating a student’s “safe space” and overall mental health. In the short run, a life of perceived certainty may feel more comfortable. In the long run, it leads to predictably poor results, yet today this is the default mode of education.

Charlie Munger had the following to say about education as things stood over fifteen years ago when he made his final revisions to the book:

“… Modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think, irresponsible. It is important not to thus put one’s brain in chains before one has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person.” [Emphasis Added]

The situation is far worse in 2024.

Recent events have clearly demonstrated that many prestigious universities are intellectual monocultures where only one set of beliefs are permissible. This is not education. It is indoctrination and an affront to young minds.

Implications for Investors

Charlie Munger’s talk on human misjudgment is not targeted to investors, but the implications seem obvious, especially for those who take public stands on their investments or make recommendations to others.

As someone who has been writing about investing for over fifteen years, I have come to appreciate and greatly fear inconsistency avoidance because I know for certain that I am not immune to the negative effects of this psychological tendency. Several years ago, I wrote an article about the risk of sharing ideas after I identified a case when taking a public stand clearly resulted in financial losses.

For many years, I posted stock write-ups on my website. I disclosed when I held positions in the stocks that I wrote about and made it clear that articles were not recommendations. Until 2022, write-ups were free. Despite no legal, financial, or even ethical obligation to post follow-up articles or to disclose my subsequent activity, I nevertheless felt a need to 1) post follow-ups if my thinking on a company changed and 2) disclose any purchases or sales along with an explanation to readers.

What is the upside of voluntarily taking actions that undoubtedly increase the risk of inconsistency avoidance tendency affecting subsequent investment decisions? The answer is that there is no upside whatsoever. This is why investors like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are rarely willing to discuss their positions in publicly traded investments and they do not disclose positions until they are required to.

In 2022, I wrote a series of profiles of public companies that I did not own, thinking that I would avoid inconsistency avoidance by having no financial interest in the companies and, again, clearly making it known that the profiles did not constitute advice. The problem is that in some cases I might have wanted to purchase shares had I not publicly written about the company. Although in no way legally or ethically barred from doing so, I avoided buying to avoid potential psychological pitfalls.

In recent months, I have restricted deep analytical articles to Berkshire Hathaway, but it is far from clear whether writing such articles is intelligent on my part. Berkshire is my most important investment and I am writing about it in public. I try hard to be unbiased, and as many of my recent articles demonstrate, I am capable of calling out negative developments. Yet, I do question whether writing about Berkshire in public might one day psychologically prevent me from taking actions in my portfolio.

I write this personal account because it is a good illustration for readers, especially those who write about their investments in public. As someone who benefits from the writing of other investors, I selfishly do not want them to stop, but I often wonder why they do it given the potential for inconsistency avoidance to cause problems.

Even for those who do not write in public, providing recommendations to family and friends can have similar effects. This is an excellent reason to never give advice to others except in highly unusual situations where one feels an obligation to help very close family members. There is limited upside and huge downside.

As the old joke goes, when you see your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner, if your stock recommendation from last year worked out, it will suddenly morph into his idea. But if you were wrong, it will always and forever be your idea!

Book Format and Abridgment

The new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a standard size hardcover book that is well constructed and obviously meant to last. For the most part, the Almanack is presented as a conventional book with few illustrations. There are ninety-eight excellent end notes and a well-constructed index.

Aside from a new foreword by John Collison, the content appears to be unchanged from the prior edition. For example, the introduction refers to the oldest talk in the book being “almost twenty years old” even though the first talk took place in 1986. Warren Buffett refers to Charlie Munger as his partner of 45 years and Charlie Munger refers to Warren Buffett as being in his 70s.

Only talk three has any explicit references to abridgment, and in those cases, reference is made to other talks where similar information is presented. I have mixed feelings about this and would have preferred to have the original talk in full even at the risk of repetition. Some amount of repetition is not a bad thing and the book, at 351 pages, would not be excessively long even if it had 25% more pages.

Since I have the first and third editions, both large-format “coffee table” style books, I can compare the reading experience. I found the revised edition easier to read in general, although at times I missed the often amusing and informative illustrations in the large-format book. Of course, I have those editions so I can always return to them. My recommendation for true Munger “cult members” is to locate a copy of the original Almanack. The new edition is fine for those mostly interested in the ideas.

I know that my net worth has benefited greatly from reading Roger Lowenstein’s biography of Warren Buffett shortly after it was released in 1995 and the same is true for Lawrence Cunningham’s compilation of Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters which first appeared in the late 1990s. Without those books, I can safely say that my investment results over the past quarter century would have been far worse.

I am less certain how much incremental wealth I have today due to reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack when it was first released in 2005. The book did not result in any specific investment decision but it greatly improved my ability to think clearly.

I know that Poor Charlie’s Almanack helped me to navigate many serious setbacks. For example, without reading Charlie Munger’s views on the futility of hatred, I would have surely fallen into that trap along with self-pity and resentment after a searing incident in which my character was viciously assaulted through lies and deception.

Not everyone enjoys relationships characterized by a seamless web of deserved trust and sometimes such trust can be misplaced with severe negative consequences. It is unrealistic to think that one can live a meaningful life without serious setbacks. It is human nature to react poorly under adverse conditions without the appropriate intellectual and emotional armor, but fortunately I had such armor at my disposal.

Life is about more than accumulating money. Understanding the psychology of misjudgment is a prerequisite for a life well lived. “Early Charlie Munger” was not the ideal role model according to the man himself, but I’d like to think that by the end of his life, Charlie Munger knew that his status as a positive role model was secure.

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— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, Section 19

The sad reality is that most of us will be forgotten a century from now.

Even those who have risen to the top of their professions and achieved fame during their lifetimes will inevitably fall into obscurity in short order. When Marcus Aurelius made this point in his private journal, he probably thought that he would be among those who are forgotten in the mists of time, even though he was arguably the most powerful man in the western world during his life.

But there are notable exceptions to this general rule.

Marcus Aurelius continues to influence millions of people today, more than eighteen centuries after his death. Marcus is one of just a handful of men from antiquity who continue to resonate in our daily lives, at least for those who have read his work.

Socrates (470 BC - 399 BC) is perhaps an even better example of a man who has had an enduring influence, and that’s in spite of the fact that did not leave a written record of any kind. Far from being an emperor, Socrates lived a simple life as a citizen of his beloved Athens. Thanks to the writings of Plato and Xenophon, the world continues to benefit from the wisdom of Socrates twenty-four centuries after his death.

I recently read several of Plato’s famous dialogues in which Socrates holds forth on a variety of topics. In The Apology, Socrates makes a lengthy defense of his life and conduct when he is put on trial after decades as an intellectual who roamed the streets of Athens examining his fellow citizens. In The Republic, Socrates seeks the truth regarding the perennial question of how one should define justice.

Socrates did not establish a school and never charged any fees to students, unlike the sophists who taught in Greece during his lifetime, many of whom became wealthy and famous. He was simply a curious man interested in learning more about human nature and sought to improve not only himself but those around him through dialogues in which he examined the logic of his interlocutors. Unfailingly polite, Socrates had a large following but also irritated powerful people. This ultimately led to his demise.

Whenever we lack primary sources, we are forced to rely on the accuracy of reporters. If we did not have the written words left to us by Plato and Xenophon, we would know little or nothing about Socrates today, but thanks to them, the candle has never gone out. The question, however, is how much of what we know about Socrates today is an accurate portrayal of the real man. Secondary sources, even well written accounts prepared in good faith, inevitably lead to a loss of fidelity.

Plato was twenty-nine years old when Socrates was executed in 399 BC. As a student of Socrates, Plato clearly put him on a pedestal and there are few reasons to question the accuracy of The Apology in which Socrates makes his impassioned defense at trial and refuses to go into exile rather than face execution. However, Plato lived nearly another half century after his mentor died and became a towering figure in his own right. In several of Plato’s dialogues, scholars question whether the real, historical Socrates is speaking for himself or has become a mouthpiece for Plato.

Paul Johnson tackles this question head-on in his concise biography, Socrates: A Man for Our Times, which I decided to read after reading several of Plato’s dialogues. My objective was to better understand the historical Socrates rather than just the version of the man revealed to us by Plato. Paul Johnson was most well known as a “popular historian” who produced short biographies of famous historical figures. His book was a perfect solution for my purposes rather than a longer academic treatise.

Johnson wastes little time blowing the whistle, so to speak, on Plato using Socrates as a vehicle to spread his own ideas:

“In his earlier writings Plato presented Socrates as a living, breathing, thinking person, a real man. But as Plato’s ideas took shape, demanding propagation, poor Socrates, whose actual death Plato had so lamented, was killed a second time, so that he became a mere wooden man, a ventriloquist’s doll, to voice not only his own philosophy but Plato’s. Being an intellectual, Plato thought that to spread his ideas was far more important than to preserve Socrates as historic, integrated human being.

Using Socrates as an articulate doll was, he saw, the easiest way to bring about this philosophical dispersal. So the act of transforming a living, historical thinker into a mindless, speaking doll — the murder and quasi-diabolical possession of a famous brain — became in Plato’s eyes a positive virtue. That is the only charitable way of describing one of the most unscrupulous acts in intellectual history.”

Johnson goes so far as to accuse Plato of creating a Frankenstein monster with his ends-justifies-the-means manipulation of his mentor’s memory to propagate philosophical ideas that Socrates never opined on. Johnson laments that it is difficult to spot the line of demarcation between Plato’s portrayal of the real Socrates and “the monster,” noting that this debate has been going on for centuries.

Fortunately, there are clues regarding Socrates that provide glimpses of the real man since he was well-known in Athens and often the subject of the famous playwrights of the era. Men who lived in the subsequent centuries, such as Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Lucian, St. Augustine, and Tertullian, had access to written material about Socrates that was later destroyed and is unknown to us. Johnson’s book is an attempt to piece together some of these clues in addition to using Plato’s work as an important source.

Johnson felt that it was important to set the stage, so he provides a useful description of the political situation in Athens during the fifth century BC, along with how the wars of the period influenced Socrates and his contemporaries. The Peloponnesian War, fought between 431 BC and 405 BC, was a ruinous period for Athens, ultimately ending with the victory of Sparta and the temporary abolition of Athenian democracy in favor of rule by a group of oligarchs hand-picked by the Spartan victors.

During the war years, Socrates lived as he always had, wandering the streets barefoot, clothed in simple garments, engaging ordinary people in dialogue. He was physically unattractive but distinctive and recognized by nearly everyone in Athenian society. Never confrontational or insulting, he liked most people and tended to be viewed as “clever” by the public. His habit of examination, however, inevitably insulted those with thin skins who did not take kindly to being exposed as empty suits.

Socrates also taught several of the political and military leaders during the decades of the Peloponnesian War and, when tyranny descended on Athens after the Spartan victory, Socrates was suspected as being complicit with the oligarchs who he had relationships with. Socrates knew nearly everyone in Athens, so naturally he knew some people of ill repute. But complicity with the oligarchy was never proven.

Socrates held unconventional beliefs for his time, particularly on the definition of justice, as I wrote about in more detail recently after reading the first two books of The Republic. Then and now, the principle of retribution was more popular than the idea of turning the other cheek. Socrates died four centuries before Jesus Christ began his ministry, so there was no religious or philosophical precedent for what Socrates was saying. The idea that it is not just to harm one’s enemies would have been entirely foreign in an age of jealous Gods who frequently sought retribution for themselves!

During his trial, Socrates was also accused of atheism, but Johnson believes that Socrates believed in God, just not in the multitude of the Gods of Greek Mythology. Johnson believes that Socrates “takes a simple view of the soul, immortal and unified, which Christians share.” He believed that God could not be the cause of evil, as we can see in the second book of The Republic, and that humans should not practice evil, even against enemies, and even when we have been grievously wronged.

“[Socrates] had a simple view of the body and the soul and their relationship. The body was the active, physical, earthly aspect of a person and was mortal. The soul was the spiritual aspect and was immortal. The body was greedy for pleasure and material satisfactions, was selfish, and if not kept under control, became a seat of vice. The soul was the intellectual and moral side of the person, which had a natural propensity to do right and to improve itself. It could be, with proper training, the seat of virtue.”

When it came time to accept his fate, Socrates acted with equanimity, rejecting Crito’s offer to help him escape, believing that violating the laws of Athens would be a fate far worse than death. For Socrates, life without Athens was not worth living. I discuss additional details regarding his view of death in my article on The Apology and Crito.

As I proceed with the Great Books, I am finding myself disagreeing with the notion that these books “speak for themselves,” at least to those of us who have been the product (victims?) of contemporary education. Unless you already know a great deal about history, how is it possible to approach ancient texts and profit from them fully?

We can certainly glean context from the Great Books, but if we do not know the basic facts that the authors assumed we would know, we will necessarily miss a great deal. Books like Johnson’s biography of Socrates and Edith Hamilton’s books on Ancient Greece and Mythology have been very helpful as I proceed with my reading project.

If you would like to listen to a review of Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson, I recommend David Senra’s discussion in Episode #252 of Founders Podcast.

The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David, 1787

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

“In this landmark of neoclassical painting from just before the French Revolution, David took up a classical story of resisting unjust authority in a sparse, friezelike composition. The Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BCE) was convicted of impiety by the Athenian courts; rather than renounce his beliefs, he died willingly, expounding on the immortality of the soul before drinking poisonous hemlock.

Through a network of gestures and expressions, David’s figures act out the last moments of Socrates’s life. He is about to grasp the cup of hemlock, offered by a disciple who cannot bear to witness the event. David consulted antiquarian scholars to create an archeologically exacting image, including details of furniture and clothing. His inclusion of Plato at the foot of the bed, however, deliberately references not someone present at Socrates’s death but rather the author whose text, Phaedo, preserved this ancient story.”

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I recently wrote an article about the importance of the Bible as a foundational text that is necessary for fully understanding the Great Books of the Western World. There is no doubt that this is very important, which was reinforced recently when I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for the second time. We simply must understand how human beings in these works of literature view the world. Faith grounded in the Bible is a major element in many of the Great Books.

Prior to the rapid spread of Christianity, the western world had a far different set of beliefs. The Old Testament narrative was the dominant worldview of the Jewish people, but they represented a very small minority. The Greek Gods of antiquity held far more influence in the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond. Anyone who has read The Iliad and The Odyssey understands how central the Greek Gods were to those stories and how bewildering it can be to keep track of the many different Gods and their various powers, not to mention their family relationships and quarrels.

I am not completely unfamiliar with the Greek Gods, but other than in Homer’s epics, I have rarely encountered them in my reading. As I started my Great Books plan, I did not feel like my cursory knowledge of the Gods was too much of an impediment as I began reading Plato. However, the third reading in my plan included two of the plays of Sophocles and I must admit that the references to the Gods became bewildering during my first reading. It occurred to me that reading Sophocles, along with his contemporaries, without a more complete understanding of the Greek Gods would be similar to reading Dostoevsky with only very limited exposure to the Bible.

It became obvious that I lacked important foundational knowledge that would hold me back in terms of understanding Sophocles and would certainly prevent me from actually enjoying the plays. It also occurred to me that I probably have only a cursory understanding of Homer as well. I decided to step back from my reading plan in order to seek out the equivalent of a “Greek Bible” that I could use as a reference.

The Greek Bible?

Earlier this month, I read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and wrote a review with my thoughts on the book. I found it to be a great introduction to the structure of society in Ancient Greece and, of course, there were some references to the Gods. However, The Greek Way is not specifically intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the Gods and ancient mythology. Those topics are covered in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology which was first published in 1942. I purchased the 75th anniversary edition and was blown away with the elegant format and illustrations of this high quality hardcover.

It is difficult to do justice to how beautifully presented this book is. I was expecting a simple book along the lines of The Greek Way rather than what I received. As an example of the book’s formatting and illustrations, take a look at these pages which introduce the famous story of Odysseus and the Cyclops:

This book is not a “Greek Bible” but it might be the closest thing we have to such a work, at least in a modern book that is meant for contemporary readers. Edith Hamilton, if she was alive today, might rebuke me for suggesting such a thing:

“Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible, an account of the Greek religion. According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion. It is an explanation of something in nature; how, for instance, any and everything in the universe came into existence: men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens.”

So, in a sense, I am using the term “Greek Bible” loosely and perhaps inappropriately. But whatever we call these stories, they form a very important part of the ancient tradition and are referred to constantly in the literature of the period. In this way, I view the contents of Hamilton’s book to be akin to the Bible in terms of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of what I am reading.

I found the narrative to be delightful, especially when Hamilton summarizes famous stories by combining the accounts that appear in multiple sources. In many cases, famous stories are fragmented, with the account divided between historians, poets, and playwrights who lived centuries apart. What has come down to us today is only a sub-set of these traditions. Hamilton presents it all in a lively and entertaining way.

The book is divided into seven parts:

1. The Gods, The Creation, and The Earliest Heroes

2. Stories of Love and Adventure

3. The Great Heroes Before the Trojan War

4. The Heroes of the Trojan War

5. The Great Families of Mythology

6. The Less Important Myths

7. The Mythology of the Norsemen

I found Part I to be the most useful for my purposes. Hamilton provides a detailed account of the twelve great Gods of Olympus, along with family trees depicting their relationships. She also provides both the Greek and Roman names of the Gods which is very useful. Most people know that Zeus and Jupiter represent the same God, but it is not easy to memorize the entire list. Each of the principal Gods is given a detailed explanation of their origin, powers, and their relationships to other Gods. These Gods do not resemble the God of the Bible. They have all-too-human emotions.

Hamilton does not stop with the principal Gods. We have briefer listings of the less important Gods who nonetheless are frequent characters in ancient literature. As I read through this part of the book, I was fascinated by the intricate relationships not only between the Gods but between Gods and mortal humans with whom they had relationships and often shared children — some immortal and some not.

For first-time readers of Homer, I think that Part III provides useful context as it discusses the heroes and legends that predated the Trojan War. Since many students are first exposed to this world in The Iliad and The Odyssey, reading Part I and Part III could serve as a jump start for better understanding. I see little downside to reading the first three parts of the book for those totally new to ancient literature.

Spoiler Alert!

Since I have read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid more than once in the past, I found Part IV fascinating. Hamilton provides her own concise summary of the Trojan War, using Homer as the primary source but also weaving in secondary sources to paint a fuller picture and to add context. She skillfully continues the story with her account of the adventures of Odysseus and Aeneas in the years after the Fall of Troy.

But I must caution the reader. Hamilton’s account gives away the plot of these classics! In fairness, her writing style and narrative assumes that her reader is familiar with these epics, and that’s probably the case for most people who pick up Mythology. However, for those who have never read Homer or Virgil, I hesitate to recommend reading Part IV before reading the epics. I recall being somewhat bewildered when I first read The Iliad, but I was enthralled with The Odyssey and, to a somewhat lesser extent, The Aeneid. I think it would have been a shame to know the plot in advance.

My recommendation is to read the first three parts of Mythology followed by Homer and Virgil, and then return to read the rest of what Hamilton has to say. This seems like the best of both worlds. I wish I had known more about the primary Gods prior to reading the epics, but I would not have wanted to know the entire story.

Modified Plan

After reading Mythology, I have decided to modify my original reading plan. I will return to The Iliad and The Odyssey for my next two books prior to proceeding with the reading lists of the Great Ideas Program. I am going to use a new translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson. I have read her translation of The Odyssey before and will read it again. I might follow this with The Homeric Hymns.

I suspect that this modification to my plan will result in a greater appreciation for the playwrights of Ancient Greece. Their audience would have been intimately aware of the Greek Gods as well as the works of Homer. Virgil, of course, wrote The Aeneid several centuries later, so I will defer a re-reading of that epic for a later time.

I anticipate keeping Mythology on my coffee table as a reference as I proceed with my reading plans. If I encounter a God that seems bewildering, I can pick up Hamilton’s book to refresh my memory. This is a far better approach than resorting to Google or some AI bot that may or may not have much of a clue about Ancient Greek culture.

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