There used to exist a literary genre called the consolatio, or consolatory essay. It is the type of thing that would be written by one person to another on the event of some terrible personal tragedy, such as the loss of a loved one. Sometimes (e.g., in the case of Boethius) the writer simply wrote it for himself. The ancient authors recognized it as a form of oratory, but it has been out of fashion for a long time now.
I have finally finished the complete translation of Cicero’s On Duties. It has been an exhausting, laborious, maddening, and joyous experience. There still remains a lot of work to do before it is finally ready for publication: revising, editing, adding more textual notes, indices, explanatory essays, and a few other things. But the end is finally in sight.
The science fiction genre is filled–too filled–with stories about what might happen if extraterrestrials came into contact with human beings. It is a favorite subject of writers, who use the theme to explore deeper truths about man and his place in the universe. And this is all well and good.
It is a pleasant thing to discover pearls of wisdom buried in the tomes of forgotten writers. We are reminded of the persistence of human wisdom, and its ability to persist down the arches of the years in all conditions and environments, whether favorable and unfavorable.
Some positive features in our characters can lie dormant for long periods of time, awaiting the right opportunity to make themselves known. Even bad men can have positive qualities that manifest themselves only under extreme duress.
I have always thought that pressure reveals the man. This has been my experience. And you never really could tell who would rise to the challenge, and who would not. Appearances in this regard can be very deceiving.
Some books are so good that they become adopted by cultures outside their place of origin. Such a book is the collection of stories and fables that has found a home in India, Iran, the Arab world, and in Europe. The book is known by many names in all of these cultures, and various version of it exist, just as we find in Aesop’s Fables or the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.
It is known most commonly in India as the Panchatantra, in Iran as the Kalīleh o Demneh, and in the Arabic-speaking world as كليلة ودمنة (Kalila wa Dimna
This is a podcast reading of an article that I published yesterday.
The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has much to say about the virtue of justice, and why it is so rare.
William H. Prescott was mentioned in the preceding article here, but I felt that he merited a more extended treatment in an article devoted to him alone. He was America’s first great historian, known for his heroic style, and for his ability to fuse a meticulous attention to original sources with a striking narrative power.
Men take their masculinity too lightly. That is, they do not value that which makes them men. They are too eager to minimize its power, to dull its sheen, and to snuff out its distinct phosphorescence.
What one does not value, is not safeguarded from outside attack.
We take so much for granted today about printed books. The wisdom of the ages can be captured and preserved for costs that are so low as to almost negligible. Save for the surfeit of information that currently exists, the modern man has no excuse not to be reasonably acquainted with his heritage.
It was not always so. Before the advent of the printing press, books circulated in manuscript form. They had to be copied by hand, and this was laborious and costly. In the ancient world, manuscript books were relatively cheap and plentiful; but papyrus became unavailable from Egypt during the Middle Ages, leaving expensive vellum as the only available medium for “mass” writing.
Quintus Curtius 
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