The Humanities Index

The epic hero has a double role. He (there are no epical woman heroes as far as I know) is an individual person with an habitual virtue from which his exploits flow, and he is representative of the group to whom the exploit is important. Since the performance of the exploit is important because of [...]

Like Euripides was for Athens, Ovid was for Rome: the iconoclast poet devoted to the education of Rome’s elite in the ways of love. He wrote satirical verse aimed at subverting what he saw as an authoritarian imposition of moral reform embodied by his contemporary, Virgil. Ovid’s major work, the Metamorphoses, makes pains to be anti-Aeneid [...]

You must crave sunlight soon. —Anticleia to Odysseus Perhaps the darkest moment in Odysseus’ journey home is his visit to the Underworld. Here the dead speak, whether the literal ghosts in the Homeric version of the afterlife, or the metaphorical shades from Odysseus’ past; the hero must meet and learn from their experiences if he [...]

The following are major ideas held by conservative writers and thinkers of Neoclassicism.

Goethe’s Faust is a complex work of literature that is concerned with the place of humanity in the cosmos.