The Humanities Index

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 [...]

Book Five of Plato’s Republic addresses the role of women in the republic. Socrates narrates this dialogue, while Glaucon plays the role of interlocutor. Since their talk concerns women, the issues of love, procreation, and ability seem to be their primary focus. Yet, before the topic of women can begin, Socrates must address, even if briefly, [...]

Plato’s Gorgias addresses the question of rhetoric: is rhetoric an art or a knack? During the course of the dialectic, other issues relating to rhetoric are examined: whether it is worse to suffer evil or to cause evil, the responsibility of people in power, the relation of pleasure and pain to good and evil, what constitutes [...]

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 [...]

Generally speaking, Augustine’s Confessions seems to be a reworking of Plato’s metaphysics in relation to a Christian cosmology. Augustine speaks of the dichotomy between the body and the soul, the falseness of rhetoric, memory, sublimity, and desire. In addressing oratory, Augustine recalls Plato’s Gorgias and its subject matter inspired by rhetoric: Truth and the human [...]